Another study showing that the problem with public schools is not a lack of money

The Phony Funding Crisis has some good data showing that the problem with government schools is not a lack of money. The article is a bit long, but worth reading. This gives a sense of the tone of the article:

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For a variety of reasons, from one year to the next, schools almost always have more real revenue for each of their enrolled students. For the past hundred years, with rare and short exceptions and after controlling for inflation, public schools have had both more money and more employees per student in each succeeding year. Teacher salaries have increased more than 42 percent in constant dollars over the past half century, while educators’ working conditions, health plans, and retirement arrangements have become ever more commodious. Moreover, school-related revenues and employment levels have increased even when the economy (as measured by Gross Domestic Product or GDP) turned down, unlike what typically happens in sectors such as manufacturing and retail sales, where recessions trigger cutbacks in personnel and profits.
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One graph in the article showed that over the last 35 years the number of students in public elementary and secondary schools has slowly climbed from fifty million students to around fifty eight million students. The fascinating thing was the number of employees sky rocketed from about 220,000 to 850,000.

To put this in context the number of students climbed by about 15% while the number of employees went up by almost 300%.

Public schools have enough money, they just need to be wiser about how it is spent. And many government programs demanding money be spent in certain ways should be cut back or eliminated.

(Hat tip: Joanne Jacobs)


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