Friday, December 19, 2008

Moron, Your new Secretary of Education

Whoops! I made a typo in the title. That's supposed to me "More on Your new Secretary of Education." Too bad this is being carved in granite and I can't go back and make any changes to it. Do you suppose anyone will notice?

Well, in any case, here's a little more on Arne Duncan and his tenure managing the Chicago Public schools. He's being hailed from all corners as a reformer. I'll second that notion. In FY03, his total appropriated budget was $4.093B. In his last year there, it was $5.786B. His budget increased by 41% during his time there. Reading test scores went from 249 to 250, an increase of 0.4%.

Each point of increase in reading scores cost $1.693B in annual funding and took 6 years to produce. Given the fact the Chicago is now 13 points behind the national average, which is a score of 263 in reading, it will take $22B per year over 78 years for Chicago to catch up using the reforms enacted by Arne.

Now that's change you can believe in!

For the sake of comparison, $22B is just a little less than the output of the entire nation of Latvia. So if Arne the Reformer is allowed to harness the power of Latvia until the year 2086, he will have Chicago performing on par with the rest of the country. What a reformer!
Obama's press conference with Arne the Reformer with most of the uhhs and ahhs and umms removed.

Update: After thinking about this for a while, what Arne the Reformer really needs is more money to build schools. I mean, what kind of schools can you build with a paltry $1.693B? Especially when he's getting so much out of that money now!

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