Throwing more money at the problem will not fix anything without incentives to spend resources wisely.
Throwing more money at the problem will not fix anything without incentives to spend resources wisely.
V ice President Kamala Harris has not said much about education on the campaign trail, but she has consistently demonstrated allegiance to the teachers’ unions who want nothing more than for American families to give away more of their hard-earned tax dollars to the public-school system.
The Democratic National Committee claims, “We have short-changed our children by underinvesting in our nation’s public schools.” They’re right about children getting the short end of the stick. But it isn’t because the system lacks funding. Taxpayers are handing over more of their money to the public schools than ever before, but adults are the ones benefiting from the investment, not kids.
The latest national data reveal that American public schools already spend about $20,000 per student each year, which is about 52 percent higher than average private-school tuition. We have increased inflation-adjusted public-school spending per student by 164 percent since 1970. Have our outcomes gotten 164 percent better? Of course not.
The teachers’ unions’ plan to give themselves more money is the definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results.
At his October campaign rally in Butler, Pa., former president Donald Trump said that “we rank at the bottom of every list” for student outcomes but “we’re at the top of the list” when it comes to spending. He has a point.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the “nation’s report card,” shows that only about one in four eighth-grade public-school students are proficient in math and less than a third are proficient in reading. The U.S. spends more per student than just about any other country in the world, and our education system still delivers mediocre results.
How can we fail so miserably while we spend so much?
The money isn’t making its way into the classroom. Despite more than doubling inflation-adjusted overall funding per student, average teacher salaries have remained flat, increasing by only 3 percent in real terms over the past half century.
If the most valuable education resource in the schools — teachers — aren’t getting the money, then who is? A lot of it is going toward administrative bloat and surges in non-teaching staff.
The latest data from the National Center for Education Statistics show that student enrollment increased by about 5 percent between 2000 and 2022. The number of teachers employed by the public-school system increased twice as fast, by 10 percent over the same period. The number of principals and assistant principals grew by 39 percent.
Administrative staff increased by 95 percent, or about 19 times the rate of student enrollment growth since 2000.
Local school districts reflect these national trends. Some of them are especially notorious for their failures. In Chicago, for example, spending has nearly doubled since 2012 to about $30,000 per student today. Spending per student skyrocketed at three and a half times the rate of inflation, whereas reading and math scores plummeted by 63 percent and 78 percent, respectively. In fact, not a single student was proficient in math in 33 public schools in Chicago in 2022.
Meanwhile, the Chicago public-school district has increased staffing by 20 percent since 2019 at the same time that student enrollment dropped 10 percent. In what other competitive industry do providers go on a hiring spree when they’re bleeding customers?
This phenomenon predates recent history. Kennesaw State University professor Ben Scafidi found that administrators and non-teaching staff increased by more than seven times the growth in student enrollment between 1950 and 2015.
The public-school system is more of a jobs program for adults than an education initiative for kids.
The main problem is that the public-school system is a one-size-fits-all monopoly with no incentive to spend additional dollars wisely. School districts can waste money and face no real accountability because families have no meaningful recourse.
In places like Chicago, where the politicians are controlled by the teachers’ unions, parents cannot take their money elsewhere if their child’s assigned public school is failing. Families must be able to vote with their feet to hold schools accountable.
Last week, at another rally in Pennsylvania, former president Trump reiterated his campaign promise to parents and said, “I will support universal school choice.”
Maybe then the public-school system will stop throwing good money after bad and cater to the needs of children as opposed to the adults running the unions.