The Bursting of the Lower Education Bubble

One of the recurring topics discussed by blogger and University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds has been the Higher Education Bubble. He contends that, just like the housing bubble of the mid-2000's, the prices for higher education have been increasing rapidly with no corresponding increase in intrinsic value. This is a classic bubble situation that invariably bursts as consumers become increasingly unable and unwilling to pay the spiraling prices.

Today, Reynolds writes of a similar situation in "lower education" (K-12). Be sure to read the whole thing but there are a few lines that I believe are absolute gems.

So at the K-12 level, we've got an educational system that in many fundamental ways hasn't changed in 100 years - except, of course, by becoming much less rigorous - but that nonetheless has become vastly more expensive without producing significantly better results.

Steady increases in per-pupil spending without any commensurate increase in learning can't go on forever. So they won't.

When our public education system was created in the 19th century, its goal, quite explicitly, was to produce obedient and orderly factory workers to fill the new jobs being created by the industrial revolution. Those jobs are mostly gone, now, and the needs of the 21st century are not the needs of the 19th.

Like striking steelworkers in the 1970s, today's teachers' immediate unhappiness may come from reductions in benefits. But their bigger problem is an industry that hasn't kept up with the times, and isn't producing the value it once did. Until that changes, we're likely to see deflation of the lower education bubble as well as the higher.

We are having much the same battle in Nevada. Per pupil spending, adjusted for inflation, has nearly tripled in the last 50 years. Student performance, which is after all what education is supposed to be about, has not improved significantly in that time. But the entrenched interests in the education establishment continue to demand more money even as the Silver State's tax revenues and private sector employment have plummeted.