You Can’t Buy Brains
Money Has Little To Do With Educational Outcomes
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Throwing money at a problem won't work if the people who catch the funding are ignorant stooges who hog the ball instead of keeping it in play.
Put another way, more money doesn't necessarily mean better results. If it did, the U.S. K-12 education system would be the envy of the world. It’s not.
In 2022, the Program for International Student Assessment tested 15-year-olds in reading, math, and science.
The U.S. ranked 9th globally in reading.
The U.S. ranked 16th globally in science.
The U.S. ranked 34th globally in math.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is a “group of mostly highly developed, democratic nations.”
U.S. students ranked 28th out of 37 OECD member countries in math. That’s not very good. In science, the U.S. fared a bit better. They ranked 12th out of 37 OECD countries. Still, they didn't manage to crack the Top 10.
And yet, the U.S. is in a virtual tie for 2nd place in spending for education. Norway spends significantly more but ranks lower on the outcomes scale. Spending more per student money doesn’t make smarter kids.
Simply put, spending money on education all too often doesn't translate into achievement because the school administrators in charge of the funds often spend it by hiring more staff to do their jobs for them.
According to the National Center for Educational Statistics:
It is clear that over the past 30 to 35 years, there have been dramatic increases in real per-pupil revenues for K-12 public education. Despite the substantial cumulative increase, the annual average increase has averaged only 2-3 percent. Consequently, educators and community school boards have had little opportunity to consider how they would use large increases in funding. As a result, educational resource allocation patterns are remarkably similar regardless of spending level.
Hidden in the NCES vapid presentation is the admonition that spending more money on education doesn't mean much if how the money is spent is left to school administrators.
Why? The administrators in all likelihood graduated from Woke colleges and universities and don’t know much about anything.
If we can move away from measuring school accountability through the way funds are used, and instead measure accountability in terms of student outcomes, the answer to the question posed in this paper will become unimportant. It won't be whether or not money matters, but how that money is used that matters.
Duh. Why did it take 35 years to figure out the obvious? Because the education system was infiltrated and taken over by the Left.
When colleges and universities produce Woke ideologues rather than bona fide educators, K-12 administrators who graduated from these institutions are likely to funnel money to like-minded morons because they don't know what the word "education" really means.
Xer Crémieux posted it a bit more plainly: “School spending–and school quality more generally–explains minimal amounts of student performance and race differences in educational achievement.”
The needle barely moves when more money is spent on students. Administrators need to quit whining about more funding, roll up their sleeves, and get back to the fundamentals
Case In Point: New Hampshire
New Hampshire public schools increased total expenditures per student from $11,336 in 2001 to $18,905 in 2019.
And now they can’t stop. New Hampshire now spends $3.9 billion on K-12 public education.
This breaks down to “an average per-pupil cost of $21,545 when counting only operating expenditures, or $26,320 when counting total expenditures (including non-operating expenses such as capital and debt). Enrollment since 2019 has fallen by just shy of 12,000 students.”
Anyone who might expect big gains from that much spending would be disappointed.
It may seem like a no-brainer that spending more money on fewer students would lead to increased educational outcomes. School systems have been telling us for decades that schools could do oh so much better if only they had the resources to hire more staff and reduce class sizes.
That’s what they did in New Hampshire. The state hired thousands of additional staff and cut class sizes.
“The state caps class sizes at 25 students in grades K-2, and 30 students in grades 3-12. Yet schools are not close to those caps, with a state average class size of just 16.9 students.”
New Hampshire’s K-12 public schools hired 10 times as many staffers as all other state and local governments combined from 2001-2019, with one exception: higher education. Even then, higher ed hired far fewer staffers than their K-12 counterparts.
“The hiring spree dwarfed all other state and local government hiring even as K-12 schools lost students and the state population (people served by non-school agencies) grew.”
Our broken education system is perpetuating failure. Kids with big dreams go to college and become teachers, are turned into Leftists even if they don't know it, get jobs in the K-12 system, and hire more Leftists into the schools. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure.
The educational outputs never really change much. Would you expect any different?
The increase in K-12 education spending that has been going on for decades is based on the theory that higher fiscal inputs would increase student success.
The theory has been proven wrong.
The education system is broken because it was taken over by Leftists who somehow managed to convince the public that the old system was broken and outdated.
The only way to fix the problem is to rid the system of the Leftists by returning to a method that promotes traditional notions of truth, virtue, and justice.
You can’t buy truth, virtue, or justice. But you can teach them so that students are ready and willing to unfold their full potential as productive members of a functioning society.