“The biggest problem plaguing U.S. public schools [is] a lack of resources.” So claims Robert Pianta, dean of the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education, in an op-ed published last week in The Washington Post. In fact, Pianta asserts, government spending on K-12 education actually has declined since the 1980s. These claims are inaccurate, as federal government data prove.
Unprecedented federal spending on education is a swindle of epic proportions.
As reported by the estimable Just Facts, federal, state, and local governments in the U.S. spent $1.02 trillion on education in 2019. This breaks down to $7,945 for every household in the country. It’s worth noting that these figures do not include land that is purchased for schools and other facilities, some of the costs of durable items like buildings and computers, and unfunded liabilities of post-employment non-pension benefits (health insurance e.g.). Here in California, when all costs are considered, the state spends over $20,000 per pupil.
But for Joe Biden, a trillion isn’t nearly enough. In March the President, or whoever is handling him these days, rolled out a $1.9 trillion “federal relief package” which includes $126 billion for schools. What the teachers unions and its allies in the media call an “investment” is really nothing more than the ongoing pillaging of taxpaying Ameri
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(.shock/Getty Images) Public-school funding has actually been increasing for decades. The real problem is a lack of incentive for schools to meet students’ needs.
Some myths never die. The Biden administration just proposed another $100 billion for school-building upgrades on top of the mostly unspent $193 billion in stimulus funding Congress had already allocated to K–12 education over the past year. Yet major media outlets are still repeating the verifiably false assertion that U.S. public-school budgets have been shrinking for decades.
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Just last week, a
Philadelphia Inquirer op-ed columnist claimed that “state lawmakers have drastically reduced state funding for public schools over the last generation.”
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