George Will, Wrong Once Again

George Will, to his credit, has a mild interest in education policy, which is more than most nationally prominent columnists can say. The problem is that his columns are nearly always based on a few tired, outdated, and/or foolish ideas about finance and schools. To wit, yesterday's column in the Post, focused on the "65 Percent Solution."

The "solution" is to mandate that all 15,000 school districts nationwide spend at least 65% of their money in a series of federally-mandated accounting categories labelled collectively as "instruction." I won't go into all the many reasons why this is a remarkably bad idea, you can see previous posts and op-eds here, here, and here. Or if you don't believe me, see Jay Greene in the National Review call the idea "horribly wrongheaded" here, or Gerry Bracey's lengthy takedown here.

For those of you who aren't full-time education policy wonks, Jay Greene and Gerry Bracey are about as likely to agree on education policy as Donald Rumsfeld and Cindy Sheehan are to agree on troop deployment in Iraq.

In addition to rehashing previous wrongheaded arguments, Will also casually maligns a federal agency with a well-deserved reputation for objectivity, neutrality, and fairness: the National Center for Education Statistics:

But in July the National Center for Education Statistics, part of the U.S. Education Department, undermined this national effort. A report on expenditures for public elementary and secondary education for the 2003-04 school year contained this finding: "The percentage of current expenditures spent on instruction and instruction-related activities was 66.1 percent in 2003-04 for the nation as a whole" (emphasis added). Seasoned students of government verbiage noted the suspiciously vague phrase "instruction-related activities."

Opacity is a sign of insincerity: Government language becomes opaque as the government's conscience becomes uneasy. When no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were found, the U.S. government began speaking foggily of finding "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities."

In other words, because the administration whose election he supported made up a bunch of stuff about WMDs, any other federal agency that releases information contradicting his poorly-conceived ideas is similarly suspect.

His complaint also highlights one of the (several) glaring flaws in the "65 percent solution" -- it's an entirely made-up standard. The number has no meaning or relationship to anything, it's just a multiple of five that was somewhat higher than another number with no relationship to anything. That's why it was no suprise when Standard & Poors found no link between the percent of money spent in the categories in question and actual student learning in the classroom.

Will does make one important point, albeit inadvertantly, when he notes that the "65 percent solution" initiative has actually been very successful, with a signficant number of states adopting it and more on the way. Despite the fact that absolutely everyone--left, right, and center--with a shred of knowledge about education hates this idea, politicians are happily adopting it just the same. There's no better evidence of the marginalized state of education policy than this.