I like to argue with studies, because I think that arguing by appealing to evidence is the Biblical model. Everywhere in the Bible, you see Jesus and the apostles performing miracles in order to validate their claims about the world. So, when I’m arguing any issue, like education policy, I want to do it with evidence. And now, we have some evidence about what works best for students.

Consider this article from the Heritage Foundation.

Here’s the summary:

An analysis of student test-score data shows that employing a chief diversity officer (CDO) in K–12 school districts does not contribute to closing achievement gaps and is even likely to exacerbate those gaps. If CDOs are not accomplishing their stated goals, what is accomplished by creating these positions? CDOs may be best understood as political activists who articulate and enforce an ideological orthodoxy within school districts. They help to mobilize and strengthen the political influence of one side. The creation of CDOs tilts the political playing field against parent and teacher efforts to remove the radical ideology of critical race theory and other illiberal ideals from school curricula and practices.

Schools have been spending a lot on administrative staff, but CBS News reported on a recent study that shows that student performance is flat or declining:

Decades of increased taxpayer spending per student in U.S. public schools has not improved student or school outcomes from that education, and a new study finds that throwing money at the system is simply not tied to academic improvements.

The study from the CATO Institute shows that American student performance has remained poor, and has actually declined in mathematics and verbal skills, despite per-student spending tripling nationwide over the same 40-year period.

The student performance is bad, but the costs of education keep rising. Why?

Where does all the money go?

Let’s look at four places where the money spent on the government-run public school monopoly ends up.

Administration

First, a lot of it gets paid to administrations who implement diversity and inclusion programs designed to indoctrinate students in leftist ideology.

Here’s a helpful chart from the American Enterprise Institute:

Pensions

Second, education employees get enormous pensions, which are paid by taxpayers and negotiated by their unions. You would never see pensions this large in the private sector.

This is from the leftist Brookings Institute, from 2014:

This figure shows we now spend nearly $1,100 per student on retirement benefits. The average public school student teacher ratio is 16 to 1. So we are spending about $17,000 per year per teacher in pension contributions.

[…]The National Council on Teacher Quality writes,

In 2014 teacher pension systems had a total of a half trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities—a debt load that climbed more than $100 billion in just the last two years. Across the states, an average of 70 cents of every dollar contributed to state teacher pension systems goes toward paying off the ever-increasing pension debt, not to future teacher benefits (p. iii).

While we are spending a huge amount to fund teacher pensions, most of that spending doesn’t go to attracting the best teachers. It’s paying off past debts.

We can’t hire good teachers, because all the education spending of today is paying for the gold-plated pensions of yesterday.

Teacher training

Third, a lot of it is spent on teacher training. I guess teaching multiplication, Shakespeare or geography changes every year? Is that why they need annual training?

The Washington Post reports on a recent study:

A new study of 10,000 teachers found that professional development — the teacher workshops and training that cost taxpayers billions of dollars each year — is largely a waste.

The study released Tuesday by TNTP, a nonprofit organization, found no evidence that any particular approach or amount of professional development consistently helps teachers improve in the classroom.

[…]The school districts that participated in the study spent an average of $18,000 per teacher annually on professional development. Based on that figure, TNTP estimates that the 50 largest school districts spend an estimated $8 billion on teacher development annually. That is far larger than previous estimates.

And teachers spend a good deal of time in training, the study found. The 10,000 teachers surveyed were in training an average of 19 school days a year, or almost 10 percent of a typical school year, according to TNTP.

Political Contributions

Finally, this is from OpenSecrets.org, concerning political contributions made in 2016:

The two largest teacher unions came in at #9 and #11. Most of their donations go to Democrat Party. Democrats believe (against the evidence) that spending more money in the government-run public school monopoly will improve student performance on tests.

The latest news is that the Biden administration is using the FBI as a weapon to attack independent journalist James O’Keefe, and his team of whistleblowers at Project Veritas. Let’s take a look at the latest story, then I’ll remind you of a few other times when Democrats have tried to silence or intimidate journalists who made them or their secular left allies look bad.

First the latest, as reported by the New York Post:

The FBI and Manhattan federal prosecutors are investigating the case of Ashley Biden’s diary: The president’s daughter says it was stolen in a burglary last year; an obscure right-wing website wound up publishing what it said are pages from it about 10 days before the election.

O’Keefe says someone shopped the diary to his Project Veritas, claiming Biden had left it somewhere. His outfit didn’t use it (in part because it couldn’t verify it), and he says he informed law enforcement of the whole thing.

But he has some ties to the outfit that did publish, which seems to be why the feds raided the homes of several current or former Veritas employees — before dawn, in O’Keefe’s own case.

He’s also outraged that the feds urged him not to go public with the subpoenas, but someone dropped a dime to the New York Times, which started calling for comment an hour after the first raids Thursday morning.

Journalists can’t be prosecuted for publishing stolen material unless they were part of the theft. And the theft in question hardly seems to rise to a federal crime.

And shield laws normally mean law enforcement can’t make reporters reveal a thing about their sources, even if they didn’t publish anything.

Journalists regularly publish material that has been leaked or even taken — consider the Times running President Donald Trump’s tax returns. Unless the feds know something about Veritas sanctioning the burglary, the diary does not warrant pre-dawn raids. It has all the marks of a political vendetta.

You might recall that Kamala Harris, then attorney general of California, also raided the homes of whistleblowers who made the secular left look bad:

The pro-abortion California attorney general’s office raided on Tuesday the home of the undercover investigator who exposed Planned Parenthood’s trafficking of aborted babies’ body parts, according to the Center for Medical Progress.

David Daleiden, the head of the Center for Medical Progress, has been a target of abortion activists and their political friends ever since he released the first undercover video last summer showing a top Planned Parenthood official discussing the sale of aborted babies’ body parts. Since then, CMP has released a dozen undercover videos of the abortion giant’s employees and partner research groups, exposing their horrendous baby body parts trade. However, pro-abortion politicians have been ignoring the evidence of wrong-doing at Planned Parenthood and attacking CMP instead.

The problem for Democrats isn’t exchanging baby body parts for money. Their problem is whistleblowers who reported the truth.

But that’s not all – the Obama administration went after journalists, too.

Remember these:

The Department of Justice (DOJ) and FBI publicly announce vast expansion of cyber related efforts to address alleged “national security-related cyber issues.”

In violation of longstanding practice, DOJ secretly and without notice seizes personal and work phone records of journalists from Associated Press from this two-month period in a leak investigation.

[…]

Fox News learns that the Justice Department secretly labeled reporter James Rosen a possible “criminal co-conspirator” and “flight-risk” in obtaining warrants to monitor Rosen’s State Department movements, phone records and emails in a leak investigation starting in 2011.

[…]

Armed Coast Guard agents under the Department of Homeland Security raid the home of reporter Audrey Hudson at 4:30am with a search warrant for her husband’s firearms. As they searched the house, they read Hudson her Miranda rights and confiscated documents that contained “confidential notes, draft articles, and other newsgathering materials” belonging to Hudson including the identities of whistleblowers at the Department of Homeland Security. (Hudson sues and later receives a settlement from the government.)

[…]

CBS News publicly announces confirmation of [journalist Sharryl] Attkisson’s computer intrusions.

“Attkisson’s computer was accessed by an unauthorized, external, unknown party on multiple occasions late in 2012…This party also used sophisticated methods to remove all possible indications of unauthorized activity, and alter system times to cause further confusion.”—CBS News

I remember a time when people on the left were concerned about the independence of journalists and whistleblowers. But I guess the communists in America are not any different than the communists of Cuba, China, USSR, etc.

By now, everyone has read about the Virginia public school scandals, and how the Democrats lost the statewide elections for Governor,  Lieutenant Governor, and Attorney General. I’ve been seeing a lot in the news about Virginia’s new black Lieutenant Governor. She’s very conservative. But there’s news about the new Attorney General (Cuban) is also very conservative.

Story from the Daily Signal.

Excerpt:

Virginia’s Attorney General-elect Jason Miyares, a Republican, said during a press conference Thursday that he plans to investigate Loudoun County Public Schools and the recent sexual assaults that took place on its campuses.

[…]A ninth grade girl was sexually assaulted by a boy wearing a skirt who entered a girls’ bathroom at Loudoun County Public Schools’ Stone Bridge High School on May 28. The same suspect allegedly committed another sexual assault just a few months later at a different school.

Juvenile court prosecutors told the first victim’s father that the suspect was under house arrest at his mother’s townhouse. But on Oct. 6, a 15-year-old boy was charged with sexual battery and abduction at Loudoun County Public Schools’ Broad Run High School for forcing a girl into a classroom, where he inappropriately touched her, according to the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office.

Miyares also said he plans to push for legislation, which was discussed on the campaign trail, that allows his office to take over when chief law enforcement officers think the state’s prosecutors are not sufficiently doing their job.

Miyares added his support for “a bill that would essentially say if the chief law enforcement officer in a jurisdiction, either the chief of police or the sheriff, makes a request, because the commonwealth’s attorney is not doing their job, then I’m going to do their job for them.”

More, he clarified that he is thinking “specifically” about “some of the so-called social justice commonwealth attorneys” who have been elected “particularly in Northern Virginia.”

Meanwhile, the new Lieutenant Governor, Winsome Sears, has promised to push for school choice, which will allow parents to pull their kids out of schools that allow biological males in female bathrooms and showers.

The far-left Washington Post reports:

Political analysts say her value to a GOP ticket led by Glenn Youngkin, the party’s nominee for governor, will depend on how successfully Democrats can highlight another side to Sears: a Trump loyalist who supports a controversial Texas ban on most abortions and whose most prominent campaign ad showed her gripping an assault rifle.

“She won the nomination in part because she was able to appeal to the most conservative base in the Republican Party,” said Bob Holsworth, a longtime analyst of Virginia politics. “But her positions byandlarge are: pro-life, Second Amendment, school choice and ballot integrity. None of those issues are necessarily winners in a statewide race right now.”

The Washington Post is appalled by these positions, but it seems like a big improvement from the policies they have now. At least for parents, not so much for government schools.