(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
So back in 2006, I wrote a daily email for the Goldwater Institute commenting on Wyoming’s plan to lavish money on their K-12 schools. Titled “Oil Millions Didn’t Make Jethro Smart” I focused on the following statement from Wyoming State Superintendent of Public Instruction Bill McBride:
Wyoming’s state coffers have been filled by the booming natural gas market. Last year the state had a $1.8 billion surplus. The state government has poured much of this windfall into its public K-12 education system.
Jim McBride, the state’s superintendent of public instruction, has offered some rather startling predictions saying, “We probably will have the nation’s No. 1 graduation rate, maybe college attendance rate. We probably will have the highest NAEP scores.”
They got the spending part down, spending a cool $16,000 + per student in 2006-07. How is the academic part working out?
Well, not so great actually…
So just in case you are reading this on your phone, that would be Wyoming’s statewide average as the flat blue line being all students in Wyoming, and the red line being Hispanics in Florida. Back in 2006, I wrote:
Jethro Bodine of Beverly Hillbillies fame, flush with petrodollars, often predicted he would be either a movie star or a brain surgeon. That never worked out either.
I’d be willing to bet that Mr. McBride is a patriotic American who loves Wyoming and wants what is best for the kids of his great state, so I don’t mean to ridicule him as a person. This idea that we should simply throw money at schools however is demonstrably WRONG and deserving of scorn. If we really want to help children, it means doing the tough work of improving the productivity of the resources in the system.
Posted by matthewladner 
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