Federal Wisdom

The US Department of Education announced in November that they had given out more than $55 million to help states establish longitudinal databases to study how well they do K-12 education.

Take two of the states - one has a population of 655,000 and a growth rate of 4.5% between 1990 and 2000. Based on census data they have roughly 199,000 school age children.

The other state, California has 35.8 million people, a growth rate three times the smaller state (13.6%) since 1990 and a school age population of 9.8 million. The first state, Alaska, got $3.5 million for this project or roughly $17.50 per kid. California got $3.3 million or about 34¢ per kid. I guess longitudinal data in Alaska is more expensive. What is unanswered is whether the $55 million is really going to help either state improve its educational system. But then that is a much tougher issue.