I must laugh when I see an article that states citizens are not getting a good return for all the extra money supposedly pumped into education since the 1960s. What a joke.
The education system has stayed almost static in the past 30 years because increased funding has done little more than keep pace with inflated prices of educational materials and population increase.In 1960, a literature text cost $2.50, and a workbook cost $1. Those same books, now made with inferior materials, cost $25 and $8, respectively. In 1960, it cost about $200,000 to build a high school with all the trimmings. Today, the same facility would cost $5 million to $10 million.
So what is the result? Pleasant Grove High School is a good example. Built in 1960 to hold between 500 and 600 students, it now has 1,200-1,400 students, yet all that has been done to increase capacity is enlarging the lunchroom, building a third small gym and adding only six classrooms.
If the district had not moved in nearly 20 mobile classrooms, and the LDS seminary had not doubled its classroom capacity to absorb some of the increase, Pleasant Grove would have hundreds of students out in the street.
Our government can send more than $10 million a day overseas in foreign aid to countries bent on bringing economic disaster to themselves and us, yet we have no tax dollars for teaching our own kids to read and write, not to mention anything about teaching them computer literacy.
We can build bombers and bureaucracies, but there's no money to help expand a child's mind. Instead, we warehouse students like cordwood in overcrowded, outdated facilities poorly stocked with obsolete teaching materials. Then, we have the nerve to wonder why test scores are dropping.
It is time this country starts putting the same kind of funding, care and technology into teaching its children that it puts into building billion-dollar aircraft carriers, bombers and space boondoggles.
R. Scott Ormond
American Fork