-- continued from post #49 above --
I will gladly argue with the followers of Milton Friedman. Unfortunately, I have discovered that most of the followers of Milton Friedman in discussion boards like this don't know or don't fully understand Milton Friedman's ideas and theories.
They complain that I am building a strawman when I am simply stating his theories. Theories that caused the Great Financial Crisis and Recession of 2008. Theories that have proven to be disastrous for the economy.
Milton Friedman's successes were in the political sphere, not economics. He discovered that he could have a lucrative career by telling the very rich what they wanted to hear. Basically that the very rich are the most important economic agents, the job creators, to put it in the terms of a more recent
huckster cheerleader for the very rich. And that they paid too much of their passive, unearned incomes in taxes.
But Friedman's economics crashed and burned starting with the disaster of the unnecessarily severe Volcker recession of 1981, caused by trying to hold the money supply constant, to the GFC&R of 2008, caused by the failure to regulate the financial markets because, they thought that the financial markets had learned to regulate themselves.
I understand that universities like Berkeley and liberal arts universities in general are politically liberal. But the majority of universities, including business schools, religious affiliated schools, military schools, agricultural schools, engineering schools, law schools, medical schools, virtually any school in the South and the Midwest are overwhelmingly politically conservative.
And it is also certain that thirty five years into movement conservatism's dominance in the government and the economy that virtually all of the problems that we see now are the failures of conservatives and of conservative policies.
Educational achievement is inversely proportional to educational spending.
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if this were true the best result that we could do would be to reduce the amount of money spent on education with the best result at zero spent on education. I would like an explanation of how you came to this remarkably counterintuitive conclusion. Others have already asked this same question.
Without question the education of a child has become more expensive because of the high administrative overhead of education. There are 50 state departments of education and more than 13,000 school districts all of which have pretty much the same problems and which pretty much come to the same conclusions about how to solve the problems. It is terribly inefficient and done to maintain the myth of local control. The parochial school model is much lower cost and more efficient, pared down to only what is needed, the schools themselves and a single source of curriculum, funding and oversight.
Public schools look poor compared to charter, private and parochial schools because public schools have to fill in for many of society's shortcomings, they have to run their own transit systems, to help to feed the poor, to be day care centers, to enforce criminal law, to provide support for the disabled, and to provide surrogate parenting, among others
As others have pointed out already public schools have to teach the disabled* now instead of locking them away. Public schools have to shoulder almost all of society's efforts to advance the poor, another job that is costly and that the schools shouldn't have to bear alone, especially since our backwards system of school financing provides the schools that have to do this with the least amount of funding to do the hardest job.
* disclosures: I am disabled. My son was LD. I and my two children went to private schools through high school. We attended public universities, all on public funded scholarships, the Navy for me and the Georgia Hope scholarships for my children.
