Jobs Machine

Dan Mitchell at his "International Liberty" blog showed a graph charting education spending with achievement of 17-year-olds since 1970. The original graph was from a blog post by Andrew Coulson at Cato's "Cato@Liberty" blog. Here's the graph:

The steep blue line represents all education spending. The flat little lines at the bottom shows the percentage change in achievement. For all the spending, we got bupkis...except for the steep dotted line. That's the percentage increase in the number of education employees.

The bottom line numbers are:

Spending on Ed: +140%
Math scores: 0%
Reading scores: 0%
Science scores: -3%
Ed Employees: +75%

Our schools are the same or worse, but they employ more people than ever. Increasing proof that the national education system isn't about education, it's a jobs machine.

(Cross Posted from Square Dots.)