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“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.
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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.”