A Sad Statement on the Value We Place on Education
The March 5th issue of Education Week scratched my research itch with a front-page article on how the coming election could potentially change the emphasis that NCLB places on "scientifically based" research; they cite a recent forum (note: the link has video! and audio!) hosted by the American Enterprise Institute, and the quotes they pulled from it are very thoughtful.
The piece that really grabbed me came from a section on funding for educational research, with many saying it wasn't enough. The DoED spent $327,000,000 on research during FY2007, which sounds like a fantastic number until you compare it to other areas. Quoting the article:
Put another way, the budget for education research is 4/10 of 1 percent of the budget for military research.
We teachers need better lobbyists.
The piece that really grabbed me came from a section on funding for educational research, with many saying it wasn't enough. The DoED spent $327,000,000 on research during FY2007, which sounds like a fantastic number until you compare it to other areas. Quoting the article:
The research and development budget of the US Department of Education falls far short of the total R&D budgets, shown below in millions of dollars and including facilities, of many other federal agencies.
Department FY 2007 Actual Defense $78,936 Health and Human Services $29,566 NASA $9,952 Energy $8,522 National Science Foundation $4,440 Agriculture $2,275 Commerce $1,080 Homeland Security $1,003 Veteran's Affairs $819 Transportation $768 Interior $607 EPA $606 Education $327
Put another way, the budget for education research is 4/10 of 1 percent of the budget for military research.
We teachers need better lobbyists.
Labels: Education Week, research, spending
posted by Ryan at 4:14 PM
5 Comments:
holy shit what makes you think the monkeys are running the asylum any country with that type of record should be ashamed of itself
steve
I thought NEA had such a strong lobby that everyone keeps complaining about and how all politicians are afraid of them. Sure doesn't seem to be the case with these figures.
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Ok let me premis this by first saying that I am one of those rare Republican NEA teachers (rare, but there are over 1 million of us out there).....
Trust me, I think there are a lot of priorities out of wack and that education should get A LOT more funding, but the thing that we tend to forget is that education is not a FEDERAL issue but rather a STATE one. The list you provided is really comparing apples to oranges because everything else on that list is federally focused and there really is no state equivilant.
The Founders felt that education was something best handled by the people in the community involved. I frankly think we need to serious look at getting rid of the Dept. of Education and turn over their entire budgets dirctly to the states specifically for each state's educational programming and research.
Wow, I saw that there were comments on this one, and cringed at the first few. Then I read "The Teacher" and felt a measure of relief.
I totally dislike these kinds of comparisons because they point clueless minds in pointless directions.
How 'bout this:
The percentage of the department of defense budget dedicated to feeding soldiers is under 10%! Horrors! Where are their priorities? Don't they care about the soldiers? How can soldiers feel supported when the Dept of Defense has such low regard for their feeding?
See the misdirection?
Fact: The federal government can only do two things in education that states could not do: 1) take money from one state and give it to another. 2) Force a state to do something it would not choose to do if left to its own devices.
Which of these two justifies holding pom-poms for more federal invovlement?
jl
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