On Monday, Michelle Obama officially began exercising her power as first lady. Making the rounds, she toured federal agencies to praise them and make them feel like they, despite being government bureaucrats, are doing legitimate work.
Speaking to the U.S. Department of Education, she proudly spouted to a group of about 350 overpaid education bureaucrats, "I am a product of your work!"
What? I call shenanigans.
She attended a selective magnet school that consistently ranks as one of the top high schools in the nation - not exactly typical of the Chicago school system. She went on to attend some of the finest private schools in the nation.
It's cute that the first lady wants to give the Department of Education a barely deserved pat on the back, but she is apparently oblivious to the reality of American public education. It's terrible, especially for poor people like the ones who lived around her in Chicago. The U.S.recently ranked 18th out of 24 industrialized nations in education, and low-income schools are even worse than rankings reflect.
But all our problems would be solved if we had more funding, right? Not so much. The U.S. already spends over $9,000 per student on average -- among the highest in the world. We allocate more than $500 billion total for K-12 education, and under Obama's plan it would add over $100 billion to the number. On a side note, I'm still not sure how spending over $100 billion in deficit money on education will be a short-term economic stimulus.
So if we spend so much, why is our education so bad? In short, the government manages to break everything it touches. The government doles out funds where it thinks they will best used, which often isn't the best place. To facilitate this, we pay billions of dollars to bureaucrats who have no direct contact whatsoever with students. Teachers unions aggravate the problem by keeping salaries low, making it impossible to hold teachers accountable for their work or fire bad ones.
Private schools, on the other hand, are run for as little as one-half the cost per pupil as the government behemoth that is public education. They also manage to pay their teachers better.
The education establishment will prevent any attempts to increase efficiency in the system through competitive solutions such as vouchers and privatization. However, we need to do something to improve the allocation of funding in education. The money is there, it's just not getting to the places it needs to be. Until it does, our education system is going to remain in the dumps and Americans will continue to struggle in a global economy.
In the meantime, the last thing we need is to have our first lady praising the DoE for work it didn't do. And we certainly don't need her to lie to them about being their "product" to make them feel better.
Michelle Obama attended competitive and private schools her entire life, and she turned out pretty well. Until everyone receives this sort of education, there's no reason to go about praising our undeserving government.
Johnathan Lott is a political science and economics sophomore. His column appears on Thursdays.
