Wasteful spending is not a sign of progress

IN education, some advocates equate increased spending with progress and spending cuts with academic decline. But as we’ve often noted, the relevant question isn’t whether government spends more, but whether that spending improves results.

At the federal level, the government often spends millions to achieve no benefit, a fact highlighted by U.S. Rep. Steve Russell, R-Oklahoma City, in the latest edition of his “Waste Watch” report.

Between 2010 and 2015, the report notes that the U.S. Department of Education directed $7 billion into the School Improvement Grants Program, which was started under President George W. Bush and supersized by President Barack Obama. Program money is supposed to aid the worst-performing schools based on graduation rates and readiness scores in reading or mathematics. Schools receiving funds are to adopt various reforms to improve student performance.

Yet Russell notes that a report released by the Department of Education “just a few days before the end of the Obama administration” concluded that “test scores, graduation rates and college enrollment were no different in schools that had received funds from the School Improvement Grants efforts than those that did not.”

Thus, it’s a positive development that President Trump has called for ending that program.

Williamson M. Evers, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and Vicki E. Alger, a research fellow at the Independent Institute, note Trump has targeted similar failed education programs in his budget proposal.

Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Evers and Alger note Trump would reduce the Department of Education’s discretionary budget from $68.3 billion to $59.1 billion, and close to two-thirds of that reduction “comes from eliminating programs that are duplicative or just don’t work.”

Trump would reduce funding for TRIO programs and GEAR UP programs that are supposed to help atrisk students get into college.

Notably, when the Mathematica Policy Research Group first reviewed a TRIO program in 2004, researchers found “no detectable effects” on collegerelated outcomes. (Activists subsequently sought a ban on control-group evaluations of TRIO and GEAR UP.)

Another program targeted is the 21st Century Community Learning Centers program, launched in 1994 to provide after-school programs to poor children.

Three evaluations published between 2003 and 2005 “concluded that the achievement of participating students was virtually the same, but their behavior was worse, compared with their peers who weren’t in the program,” Evers and Alger note.

Mark Dynarski, who worked at the agency during the Clinton administration and later directed Mathematica’s evaluation of the 21st Century Community Learning Centers program, put it bluntly: “It’s a $1.2 billion after-school program that doesn’t work.”

As Russell writes in his report, “The solution is not to simply spend more on education. We need to spend our dollars wisely, by eliminating educational waste and push these dollars to teachers and classrooms. Additionally, we must change the perception that more money spent always equals a better outcome. This report shows the flaw in that thinking.”

Indeed. Spending money to no effect is not progress, and eliminating waste is not harmful.