Florida Lacks Hobgoblins

In his recent contribution to Cato Unbound, creativity guru Richard Florida argues that continued economic growth will depend on “regional, national, and global efforts to harness the creativity of each and every human being.” Fair enough. What, then, is his education policy prescription for attaining that goal? He doesn’t say –- at least, not in the aforementioned posting.

Looking for an answer, I turned to Florida's other writings, browsing them for references to “education” and “schools.”

This search quickly revealed that Florida places great emphasis on improving our education system. “What we really need in order to prepare our children for the creative economy,” he exhorts, “is a comprehensive education, something that takes them from aesthetics to algebra without pretending that the two are mutually exclusive” (Flight of the Creative Class, 2005, p. 255). He adds, “As society diversifies and specializes, more and more different kinds of education and teaching styles must be made available.”

So increased educational diversity appears to be the order of the day. Or does it?

Writing in Washington Monthly in 2003, Florida conspiratorially confides that “no one wants to admit this openly, but we're already headed toward effective federal government takeover of troubled public schools…. Only a national strategy can repair the now broken connection between good local schools and regional prosperity.”

Increased educational diversity through more pervasive central planning? Alas, the cognitive dissonance is only beginning.

Florida’s next education policy prescription is higher spending. To make his point, he trots out the embarrassing jade that “it will be a strange day when our schools get all the billions they need and the army has to hold a bake sale to fund its bombers.” To drive the point home, he characterizes current U.S. public school spending as “paltry sums of money” (Flight, p. 255).

As Florida surely must know, total U.S. public school spending now stands at roughly one half of one trillion dollars a year. Annual per-pupil spending is roughly $10,000. That is a quarter of a million dollars for every classroom of 25 students.

The only nation on Earth currently spending more per pupil at the K-12 level is Switzerland. The Netherlands, which routinely trounces the U.S. on international tests of academic achievement, spends $4,000 less per pupil annually.

Having laid waste to his credibility with the trivially falsifiable claim of underfunding, Florida immediately downplays his own argument. A mere three pages after throwing money and slogans at the problem, he explains that “throwing more money and slogans at the problem will only get us so far” (Flight, p. 258).

If consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, the mind of Richard Florida is a vast hobgoblin-free zone.

Whatever the merits of his claim that the presence of creative bohemians causes economic growth, Florida does not seem to have a coherent education policy for promoting creativity or, for that matter, anything else.