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rising at an extraordinarily high rate, far faster than our total income. Teachers' salaries have been rising far faster than returns in comparable occupations. The problem is not primarily that we are spending too little moneythough we may bebut that we are getting so little per dollar spent. Perhaps the amounts of money spent on magnificent structures and luxurious grounds at many schools are properly classified as expenditures on schooling. It is hard to accept them equally as expenditures on education. And this is equally clear with respect to courses in basket weaving, social dancing, and the numerous other special subjects that do such credit to the ingenuity of educators. I hasten to add that there can be no conceivable objection to parents' spending their own money on such frills if they wish. That is their business. The objection is to using money raised by taxation imposed on parents and non-parents alike for such purposes. Wherein are the "neighborhood effects" that justify such use of tax money?
A major reason for this kind of use of public money is the present system of combining the administration of schools with their financing. The parent who would prefer to see money used for better teachers and texts rather than coaches and corridors has no way of expressing this preference except by persuading a majority to change the mixture for all. This is a special case of the general principle that a market permits each to satisfy his own tasteeffective proportional representation; whereas the political process imposes conformity. In addition, the parent who would like to spend some extra money on his child's education is greatly limited. He cannot add something to the amount now being spent to school his child and transfer his child to a correspondingly more costly school. If he does transfer his child, he must pay the whole cost and not simply the additional cost. He can only spend extra money easily on extra-curricular activitiesdancing lessons, music lessons, etc. Since the private outlets for spending more money on schooling are so blocked, the pressure to spend more on the education of children manifests itself in ever higher public expenditures on items ever more tenuously related to the basic justification for governmental intervention into schooling.
As this analysis implies, the adoption of the suggested ar-

 
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