This doesn’t just happen on the Left Coast. The University of North Carolina at Wilmington saved some money by lumping together two science departments and raised spending on its five diversity-multicultural offices.
Sherry Lansing, chairman of the University of California board of regents, pauses as she speaks during a press conference following the University of California board of regents meeting on July 14, 2011, in San Francisco.
How many times have you heard Barack Obama talk about “investing” in education? Quite a few, if you’ve been listening to the president at all.
In fact Americans have been investing more and more in education over the years, led by presidents Democratic and Republican. But it’s become glaringly clear that we’re getting pretty lousy return on these investments.
That’s been evident at the K-12 level for a long time. Teacher unions and education-school types have had custody of most of our public schools for more than three decades, during which test results and high school graduation rates have been mostly stagnant.
It has come to the point that Democratic politicians like former New York City superintendent Joel Klein, past and current Chicago Mayors Richard M. Daley and Rahm Emanuel, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, and Newark Mayor Cory Booker have taken on the teacher unions.
Obama’s education secretary, Arne Duncan, deserves credit for doing a bit of this as well. All this, despite the fact that teacher unions funnel millions of taxpayer-funded dollars into Democratic campaigns.
On higher education Democrats and many Republicans as well have followed the same course as on public schools: Shovel in more money, in this case in the form of Pell Grants and subsidized student loans.
[…]
