The Morning Rant

Unions are one of the most corrosive influences in America, and teachers unions (along with government employee unions) are the worst of the bunch. They drive an aggressive progressive agenda into our schools, while sucking state and municipal coffers dry in their never-ending quest for more...more...more. The education of our children is an afterthought. Number one on their agenda is of course more money and less work. Number two is to relegate actual teaching to a few minutes each day, and concentrate on the leftist agenda of racial and gender politics, and above all the denigration of America.

And all of that is protected by their oceans of money extorted from their members.

Except in right-to-work states! And guess what? Mississippi is one of those states. Is it a coincidence that with increased accountability and more important, dissemination of objective data about the success of their schools, that Mississippi rapidly can improve their education outcomes?

Mississippi Proves that More Money Won't Fix Our Schools

Over the past decade, Mississippi has made such progress in fourth-grade reading that people have taken to calling it the “Mississippi miracle.” Mississippi ranked 9th in the country for fourth-grade reading in 2024, up from 49th in 2013, a forty-place climb in a decade, from near the bottom of the table into the top ten.

Mississippi’s fourth graders now read better than their peers in New York, Minnesota, and California -- every one of them a state that spends a great deal more per child than we do. And here is the part the spend-more crowd would rather you did not dwell on. We get those better results on far less money.

Mississippi spends around $12,300 per pupil, one of the five lowest figures in America. New York spends $31,918 -- more than two and a half times as much -- and its children read less well for it. New York, in other words, buys more than two dollars of schooling for every one of ours, and ends up further behind.

The education of our nation's youth is not an intractable problem, especially because the skills necessary to teach children are not particularly rare or difficult to train. And the reality is that education is a product, just like everything else in an economy, and if the transactions are transparent, with accessible data describing that product, then the consumer -- parents -- can make informed decisions. And the providers -- the schools -- can respond to those market pressures. Only when unions and politicians interfere with those decisions is the basic education of our youth at risk.

[Crossposted at CutJibNewsletter and X/Twitter]. If you folks who are on X/Twitter would follow us it would be much appreciated!

posted by CBD at 11:00 AM

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