Resources for education.

This quote from Albert Einstein should be more widely known: "Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted."

As a simple example, love counts but can hardly be counted.

The teachers' unions can count things - and they are very good at it - but insist on counting inputs: dollars spent, teacher to student ratios, new schools built or renovated, teacher pay. They want us to accept, without much evidence, that adding more of these will automatically improve the outcomes.

They carefully neglect to inform us that Washington DC and Newark NJ are high on the list of big spenders (dollars per enrolled student) but the outcomes in those cities are barely better than disastrous.

We should really be asking about the percentage of children that graduate from High School and the quality of their education. It is fairly easy to answer the first part of this question although adjustments for relocation of families can be difficult.

The question about quality of education is really hard. The No Child Left Behind Act - currently up for re-authorization by the U.S. Congress - does a fair job of measuring the very basic skills even if some states do cheat by setting really low standards. The legislation, however, seems to encourage "teaching to the test" and entirely neglects such important subjects as foreign languages, music and art.

And measuring the percentage of high school graduate who go to college - even highly selective colleges - does not give us an honest and useful answer. The reason is because the percentage of college students who do not graduate is far higher than we would like while the percentage of college freshmen in remedial classes is shocking.

If we want good policies, we will have make an effort to count the right things, to challenge the things that can be counted but whose values do not count, and to make qualitative judgements about things that can not be counted.