President Clinton wants to set up new educational programs to remedy the failures of past programs. And teachers' unions say more spending is the answer. But research indicates students' test scores have been going down, even as spending has been going up.

• From 1945 to 1965, real per student expenditures doubled in the United States.

• From 1965 to 1985, they doubled again -- then increased 20 percent in the ten-year period since then.

• Yet median SAT scores reached their apogee in 1963 -- when per pupil spending was about $2,400.

Today, expenditures are well above $6,000 per pupil -- while median Scholastic

Assessment Test scores are lower by about 150 points than they were in 1963.

While Iowa spends less on education than almost any other state in the Union, students there routinely score first or second in SAT performance.

Confronted by evidence of this nature, many voters and taxpayers are abandoning the notion that there is any correlation between greater spending on education and increased student performance.

Source: Prof. Herbert London (New York University), "Education and the Money Question," Washington Times, October 30, 1996.

With hard-pressed taxpayers wondering why school children can't read, President Clinton says the answer is more money for education: $2.75 billion over five years to ensure that third graders are sufficiently proficient in reading skills. But frustrated parents contend they are already paying for something their children aren't getting.

• Over the past 25 years, inflation-adjusted, per-pupil spending for grades kindergarten through 12 has climbed 88 percent.

• In 1994, 40 percent of fourth graders failed to demonstrate basic reading skills -- with just 30 percent testing as proficient.

• Yet public-school teachers' pay rose 7.4 percent after inflation from 1970 through 1993 -- compared to a real gain of only 1 percent for all private-sector wages.

• While enrollments were falling, the number of teachers rose 24.2 percent from 1974 to 1994.

Nonproductive growth aside, concerned experts say that an educational establishment which cannot resist faddish and damaging educational experiments -- ignoring spelling, stressing self-esteem over basics -- bears a large share of the blame for illiterate third graders.

Source: Editorial, "Public Schools: Change or Die?" Investor's Business Daily, September 30, 1996.

President Clinton proposes to solve the problem of elementary school students who are woefully deficient in reading skills by spending another $1.75 billion on new literacy programs. Somehow, an increase of less than one percent in expenditures on education supposedly will ensure that every American child can read by third grade.

• But the U.S. already spends more on public education than almost any other nation.

• More than $240 billion was lavished on elementary and secondary schools in 1994.

• That amounts to $5,300 per student -- compared to $3,900 per student as recently as 1980.

• Yet, 40 percent of fourth grade students fail to meet basic reading standards -- and the average reading proficiency of nine-year-olds has declined since 1980.

By contrast, Catholic schools spend about half what their public school counter parts do ($2,800 per pupil compared with $5,300) yet parochial students outperform public ones. Such results have led many educators to demand that schools be privatized -- so as to increase their quality through competition.

The problem with increasing spending at the federal level, however, is that much of it goes to top-heavy bureaucracies, not to classrooms or teachers.

High funding levels, experts say, are less important than how money is spent.

Some education specialists fear Mr. Clinton's latest plan say it has less to do with boosting reading scores than with fulfilling political promises to teachers' unions. During the last presidential election, candidate Clinton promised the National Education Association, "I won't forget who brought me to the White House."

Source: Linda Chavez, "Promises Don't Help Kids Read," USA Today, September 4, 1996.

• Reading scores were lower in 1994 than1992, with 30 percent of high school seniors not even "basic" readers.

• That means some 750,000 youngsters graduate every year without the most basic skill.

• As for U.S. history, the 1994 results show just 11 percent of high school seniors have satisfactory knowledge.

For two decades, there was bipartisan support for increasing resources and expanding services, particularly for poor children. In the 1980s a different consensus emerged outside Washington that holds that weak achievement and poor quality are our foremost educational problems and that reform strategies should focus on student performance.

Yet the 1996 education appropriations bill shows how little has truly changed in Washington.

• In more than a dozen areas, the Senate bill actually keeps alive activities the Clinton White House sought to kill -- maintaining, for example, Sen. Ted Kennedy's Star Schools.
  

• The Senate bill would spend $29 billion, compared to the administration's request for $29.6 billion for 105 programs.

• The House education bill provides a little less, with $27 billion for 84 programs, and it would wipe out the Goals 2000 program.

The real revolution is outside Washington, where 19 states have enacted charter school laws and two have passed voucher programs. Further, at least 10 communities are experimenting with private contract management of publicschools.

The Education Department now employs nearly 5,000 people and spends about $500 for every student in America, to very little effect.

Source: Chester E. Finn Jr., "Federal Investment or Intrusion?" Hudson Policy Bulletin, No. 17, December 1995, Hudson Institute, Herman Kahn Center, P.O. Box 26-919, Indianapolis, IN 46226, (317) 545-1000.