The Heritage Foundation reports.
Excerpt:
The U.S. Department of Education recently released the 2013 results of math and reading achievement for 12th graders on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. It’s hard to say what’s been achieved.
According to the NAEP—a standardized test often referred to as the nation’s “report card”—just 26 percent of the country’s 12th graders are proficient in math. Only 38 percent are proficient in reading. Those numbers are entirely unchanged since 2009, when the NAEP was last administered.
Notably, reading achievement was significantly higher overall in 1992 when the NAEP exam was first administered in reading. Forty percent of students were proficient in reading in 1992. The new NAEP scores confirm the outcomes found on the NAEP long-term-trend assessment, which has assessed reading achievement since 1971 and math achievement since 1973. Twelfth graders today perform no better in reading than high school seniors of the early 1970s.
So is spending on education the same today as it was in the 1970s?
Let’s see:
Since the 1970s alone, inflation-adjusted federal per-pupil spending (part of the goal of which was to narrow achievement gaps) has nearly tripled.
The behemoth federal Department of Education filters all of this taxpayer money through more than 100 federal education programs, many of which are duplicative, most of which are ineffective. It’s no surprise then that this administration’s policies, which seem designed to increase program count and spending, haven’t moved the needle on achievement either.
The article has a graph showing that the biggest reason for this increase in costs is “Non-Teaching Staff”. I think that might be a problem. Maybe the task of education should be pushed down to the states or even local governments, where they can be more responsive to the needs of the customers?
WINTERY KNIGHT 
AS a public school teacher for six years: I think it comes down to two key factors: Student to teacher ratio and students motivation. Money can fix one, but not the other. I think until both are fixed we will continue to see a decline.
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Class size:
http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/lets-rethink-classsize-amendment
http://www.heritage.org/research/commentary/2000/05/a-lesson-in-smaller-class-sizes
http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2000/06/do-small-classes-influence-academic-achievement
School choice is the real solution – performance will not improve until teachers are accountable to their customers, as is the case everywhere else in the free market. We need to be able to fire underperforming teachers.
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Vouchers. Homeschool. At least until prayer is allowed back into the failed liberal and union controlled government schools. Good video: http://www.godtube.com/watch/?v=KWGWNNNX
Statistics to back it up: http://www.whatyouknowmightnotbeso.com/graphs.html Correlation does not imply causation, so let’s go back to prayer and Bible reading in government schools to see if this is really causative. I’m sure that the atheists will be open to gathering objective empirical data. :-)
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Students can pray in public school and read their Bibles in public school. Any school official who denies a student’s right to do this is breaking the law.
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Don’t be ridiculous.
http://miami.cbslocal.com/2014/05/05/teachers-ban-on-reading-bibles-in-class-sparks-protest-change/
http://www.clickorlando.com/news/5yearold-seminole-county-student-says-teacher-told-her-not-to-pray/25256916
http://www.wxii12.com/news/local-news/north-carolina/valedictorian-surprises-graduation-crowd-draws-cheers/-/10622650/20409832/-/vf9888z/-/index.html?absolute=true
Also see this:
http://nypost.com/2012/01/19/nycs-senseless-slap-at-prayer/
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/05/06/watch-what-happens-when-one-parent-speaks-out-at-a-school-board-meeting-about-a-controversial-book-assigned-to-his-daughter/
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/05/20/NC-teacher-screams-student-Obama
http://radio.foxnews.com/toddstarnes/top-stories/atty-says-school-threatened-punished-boy-who-opposed-gay-adoption.html
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-gay-schools-20111016,0,3314844,full.story
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/09/22/texas-school-punishes-boy-for-opposing-homosexuality/
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I read the first series of links you provided, as they deal with Bible reading and prayer specifically. (The third link did not work, by the way.) In the two cases I was able to read about, the incident stemmed from teacher ignorance and was corrected or reversed when challenged.
Anecdotally, I personally know of an incident in my school district (I live in Northern Virginia) that involved another parent I know and his daughter. She brought her Bible to school to read and was told by her teacher that she couldn’t do that in school. The father (a children’s minister in my church) had a talk with the teacher and she relented.
So, I submit that, unless the teacher or school administration is ignorant of the law, Bible reading and prayer are permitted in public school.
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The situations were not remedied in any of the cases cited. The third link works.
In the Miami case, the teacher faced no consequences and no apology was issued. The plaintiffs have retained a lawyer.
In the Orlando case, the teacher faced no consequences and no apology was issued. The case is going to trial.
In the valedictorian case, the solution was civil disobedience by the student – the school’s official policy was censorship as a result of pressure from secular fascists.
I guess you are ok with secular fascists facing no consequences, but I am not.
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The third link works on my iPad for some reason, but not my PC. I blame Bill Gates :-)
I do remember the valedictorian incident and it says in the article that no consequences were forthcoming, so…
I’m not sure what punishment you think the teachers/administrators in these cases should face. Should they lose their jobs? I don’t know. I still submit that these few incidents are outliers and that the vast majority of schools would allow a student to read a Bible and pray without incident.
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Well, in my view, the entire Federal Department of Education should be abolished. But that would not be punishment for these incidents, it would just be to get rid of a corrupt system that allows adult children to persist in a kind of adult daycare where they can be paid regardless of the usefulness of what they actually do. Making public schools accountable to parents is much easier the lower down it gets pushed. Then maybe instead of seeing the anti-religious behavior I documented, we would see children learning to read and write and do math and do science.
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Ray, that is an interesting point you are making, but as WK shows empirically, the government schools have really become anti-Christian, not merely secular – in an intellectually honest sense.
I might add that the skyrocketing behavioral problems are, I believe, a direct causative result of the removal of standards (specifically the God Standard) from the schools. (I can’t prove the causation, so let’s run the experiment, OK? Can we turn back the clock for the sake of fair science and the health, welfare, and academic performance of our nation’s students?)
So, it’s not just an issue of the fact that an individual student can, of his or her own free will, (sometimes) read a Bible or pray. It’s that all of the students are not “playing from the same sheet of music” when it comes to behavioral standards – as they were prior to 1963. I guess I’m willing to take spitballs over AR-15’s in our hallways – as well as love notes between teenagers versus student-teacher sex.
And, while the atheist can indeed concoct a man-based system of secular ethics, we have seen some famous atheists at least have the courage to admit that such a system is un-ground-able in an objective sense: https://winteryknight.wordpress.com/2014/01/16/an-atheist-explains-the-real-consequences-of-adopting-an-atheistic-worldview/#comment-101449
Therefore, since the futures (and in some cases, lives!) of the nation’s children are at stake here, let’s put the Bible back in the government classrooms and let those (very few) “committed atheist” kindergartners opt out of Bible and prayer time, and see what happens. (We can let the atheist ones pray to Darwin, OK?) I mean, even an atheist, if intellectually honest, can derive some wisdom from the teachings of Jesus, right?
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