September 19, 2013
Mark Cuban loses $1 million
in a failed tech-startup investment.
Cookbook sales
for Giada De
Laurentiis are a little light this quarter.
Miguel Cabrera’s batting
average drops three points.
They’re
metaphors that come to mind while reading “Most States Funding
Schools Less Than Before the Recession.” Published by the Center on Budget
and Policy Priorities (CBPP), the paper frets about “less per-pupil funding for
kindergarten through 12th grade than … six years ago -- often far less.”
Ooo -- grisly.
But the center’s data are selective, and its claim that “large cuts in funding
for basic education undermine a crucial building block for future prosperity”
is laughable.
CBPP’s chief
villains are Oklahoma and Alabama. Both reduced government-school
expenditures, per pupil, by more than 20 percent between the 2008 and 2014
fiscal years. (Most states entered FY14 on July 1.) Eleven states -- including Texas, Idaho, and South Carolina -- rolled
back their subsidies by between 10 and 20 percent. Not surprisingly,
moonbat-heavy Maryland, Massachusetts,
and Connecticut
were among the states that raised
education-monopoly funding during the Bush-Obama economic
implosion.
Here’s another
non-shocker: The mainstream media dutifully, and uncritically, transmitted the CBPP’s
findings. The Topeka Capital-Journal
noted that “a national survey showed” that “Kansas imposed the fourth-deepest cuts in
state funding to K-12 public education since recession threw government budgets
into a tailspin and fostered a school finance austerity movement.” As its
city’s government-school system faces “a devastating fiscal crisis,” The Philadelphia Inquirer gushed, “a new
report from a national group says most states … are spending less to educate
each student than they did in 2008.” The
Arizona Republic wrote that its state reduced “per pupil funding 17.2
percent since fiscal 2008 when adjusting for inflation, behind only Oklahoma and Alabama.”
(“All of the individuals that suffered unnecessary cuts will have them
restored,” a top Republican in the statehouse assured the newspaper.)
In the realm
of reality, CBPP’s “large cuts in education spending” are illusory. “Most
States Funding Schools Less Than Before the Recession” examined not
expenditures overall, but revenue
“distributed through states’ major education funding formulas.” Government
schools pay the bills from a variety of income sources, including property
taxes and grants from Uncle Sucker. In 2011, according to the U.S. Census Bureau,
local revenue covered a hefty 50 percent of spending. In the last few years,
the “stimulus,” combined with property-tax hikes imposed by town/city pols,
kept the money flowing to schools. Cuts were negligible. The bureau
reported that fiscal 2011 “marked the first decrease in per student public
education spending since [it] began collecting data on an annual basis in
1977.” The decline: a cavernous 0.4 percent.
The CBPP’s
propagandists found another clever method to spin the stats. Rather than add
some long-term perspective, they ignored the explosion of revenue devoted to
the enrichment of “the children” during the last half-century.
Due to
differences in data collection and computation, no two researchers agree on exact
numbers. So let’s keep things as simple as possible, and explore K-12
expenditures, per pupil, excluding capital and interest costs, adjusted to the
value of a dollar in 2010. Since
1960, the spending has been lavish:
1960 $2,552
1970 $4,212
1980 $5,547
1990 $7,556
2000 $8,537
2010 $10,862
The results? A
recent survey of executives by
the American Management Association found that “the majority of their
workforce is average -- or below average -- in communication skills (62%),
creativity (61%), collaboration (52%), and critical thinking (49%).”
Instead of
whining about chimerical “cuts,” the CBPP could have used its number-crunching
aptitude and media-manipulation prowess to spark a useful discussion of
education policy.
Utah, Missouri,
South Dakota, Nebraska,
and Colorado
are in the front rank of student achievement, yet spend relatively small sums
on their government schools. High-scoring Connecticut
and Massachusetts
are spendaholics. Florida, Nevada,
and Mississippi
fall near the back of the book-learnin’ pack, with expenditures that surely
give CBPP’s staffers the vapors. Illinois, Wyoming, New York, and Rhode Island are twice
cursed -- producing rather poor outcomes for their extravagant “investments.”
Does competition
from private schools, charter schools, and homeschooling play a role in
improving efficiency? Is teacher unionization less prevalent in states with
successful education systems? What’s going on in the homes of states with high-achieving students?
No, such
questions aren’t interesting to the unlimited-government movement. Liberals
continue to offer the same, threadbare prescription of higher spending -- for
reducing class sizes, more preschool, and boosting teacher pay. It dupes a lazy
and sympathetic press. Parents and taxpayers, one hopes, are growing skeptical.
D. Dowd Muska (www.dowdmuska.com) writes about government, economics, and technology. Follow him on Twitter @dowdmuska.
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