In his Sacramento Bee column Dan Walters looks at a Manhattan Institute study of high school graduation rates contrasted with per student expenditures. The results were:

New Jersey tops all states, according to a recent Census Bureau report of 2003-04 data, in per-pupil school spending at $12,981 and also, as mentioned earlier, is tops in high school graduation rates. But beyond that, the correlation completely collapses. New York, for example, is second in per-pupil spending at $12,930 but is 47th in graduation rate at 58 percent. Conversely, Utah, dead last in spending at $5,008, is 14th in graduation rate at 77 percent.

Some high-spending states rank high in graduation, and some do not. Some low-spending states rank low in graduation, and some do not. There's simply no correlation. In fact, 17 of the 25 states that fall below California's $7,748 in spending outperform California in high school graduation rates, including No. 2 Iowa and No. 4 North Dakota.

Clearly, money alone is not the panacea that advocates in the educational community would have us believe. Other factors - ethnicity, peer pressure, families, culture, English proficiency, curriculum, instructional quality, etc. - evidently play powerful roles in determining whether students make it through high school and thus acquire the fundamental basis for successful adult lives.

Of course real education reformers already knew this. The solution to most public education problems is not money, but it is the real change of educational practices and structure.