Funding Public Education in America

By Peter Pavarini

Sometimes, it takes a triple-witching hour – the convergence of three unrelated events – to draw my attention to a particular issue.

This week, when I wasn’t dealing with the coronavirus hysteria, I learned that – curiously – a local school levy had been appended to Ohio’s primary ballot on March 17.[i] That got me to thinking about the unending growth of government programs such as Bernie Sanders’ “Free College for All” proposal and its political cousin – the cancellation of all school debt. On top this, a high school friend reminded me that we’ll be attending our 50^th reunion later this year.

One Baby Boomer’s Experience With Public Education. By way of background, I’m proud to say I’m largely a product of public education. I attended grades K through 12 in a public school system on Long Island and obtained a bachelor’s degree from the State University of New York. Although I earned my law degree at a private school, I’ve always believed that, as a second-generation Italian-American who grew up in modest circumstances, public education served me extremely well. As an adult, I’ve attributed my shot at the American Dream not to any elite prep school or Ivy League college, but to the kind of competent, rigorous public education that was available to a kid growing up in the 50s and 60s.

The school district I’ve lived in for 33 years – which educated both of my sons – is one of the better ones in Ohio. When we moved here in 1987, it was a small rural district which taught all grades in a single building. The district has, however, been blessed (some would say cursed) with explosive growth over the years and now operates 15 elementary schools, 5 middle schools, and 4 high schools which serve about 21,000 students. Obviously, growth like that requires a great deal of money, particularly in a state where most school funding comes from local property taxes. Consequently, a levy seeking a 17% increase in local school taxes shouldn’t have come as a complete surprise.

Nevertheless, in an era of burgeoning federal deficits and a governmental tax burden exceeding 40% of the GDP, any proposed tax increase deserves a closer look.

Admittedly, I’m a pack rat. So, I went up to the attic and retrieved 33 years of real estate tax invoices. I discovered that, during that time, my annual local tax bill has gone up a whopping 822% – most of it while living in the same house for 30 years. I dug deeper and determined that the lion’s share of those tax increases have gone to fund our local public schools. Adjusted for inflation, my taxes for police, fire, parks, roads, etc. have hardly budged. It’s important to note that while my school district’s student population has certainly multiplied over three decades, so did its tax base. Theoretically, increased property values should provide most of what’s needed to keep up with the cost of education, but according to the proponents of the levy, they haven’t. Why is that?

The Escalating Cost of Public Education. As I’ve also learned, the extraordinary growth in my local taxes is roughly consistent with what has been going on throughout the U.S. over the past 50 years. In inflation-adjusted dollars, America’s public schools now cost two-and-a-half times more than they did in 1970, the year I graduated high school. At 7.3% of GDP, our Nation spends more on education (pre-K to university) than it does on Medicare (2.9%), defense (3.5%), and Social Security (4.8%). Maybe we all should be happy about that. After all, what’s more important than educating our children and grandchildren? There’s only one problem with this picture – by just about every measure, the U.S. continues to lose ground to other developed nations in terms of educational achievement.[ii]

Money may buy a lot of things in life, but it apparently doesn’t guarantee academic success.  Except for a handful of smaller countries which do not have America’s diversity (Switzerland, Norway, Luxembourg, Austria), no one spends more on K-12 education than the U.S.[iii] Even among the 50 states, spending levels do not track academic results very closely, if at all. A state like New York can spend nearly twice as much ($21,206) as the national average per pupil ($11,193) and produce only mediocre results. While a state like Utah can spend a little more than half the national average ($6,575) and get excellent results.[iv]  Clearly, there are factors other than the amount of school funding at work.

Let’s quickly dismiss the often-heard excuse for failing public educational systems – that we are not paying enough to attract the best talent to the teaching profession. I used to believe this fallacy. After all, I idolized many of my public school teachers. I often wondered whether I had been fortunate to be taught by the last generation of Dead Poets Society, self-sacrificing educators working long hours for meager wages because they truly loved kids like me. No doubt, there are some generational factors in play, but today’s teachers are – by and large- paid well by global standards.[v] Between 60% and 80% of a public school’s budget is spent on teacher salaries and benefits. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, in 2018, the U.S. spent $378 billion on teacher salaries and another $136 billion on healthcare and retirement benefits. But the greatest surprise is this statistic: whereas, in 1970, there were 22 students per teacher in the U.S., today there are only 12 students per teacher. Nonetheless, during the same 50-year interval, teacher salaries have increased about 10% adjusted for inflation.[vi]

Changes in American Society. Of course, American society has dramatically changed in 50 years. Compared to when I grew up, Americans are more ethnically diverse, they are living longer and having fewer kids. Public school enrollment peaked in 1971, the year after I graduated high school. The generations following the Baby Boom didn’t put much growth pressure on the public schools until the late 1990s. Between 2000 and 2016, public school enrollment returned to about 56.2 million[vii] , but due to falling birth rates in this century, it is projected to decline by 8.5% over the next decade.[viii]

Although the total number of school-age kids hasn’t changed very much, the composition of the student body has. Since 2000, there has been a 29% increase in the number of children for whom English is a second language, and there has been an 83% increase in the number of students with disabilities. Both of these factors have driven down classroom size and increased the need for translators, counselors and special service providers. On top of that, the country is experiencing a major population shift from the northern to the southern states.  This has caused the schools with shrinking enrollments to become more inefficient and thus more costly per student, and the schools with growing populations to be in need of more teachers, facilities and transportation.

Making It All “Free”. Which brings me to the point of this blog. Given these demographics, would cancelling existing college debt and making public colleges and universities tuition-free be good for America? Leaving aside the question of how to pay for such policies, we should ask whether spending more on our educational system – specifically at the post-secondary level – is a prudent “investment”, to use that well-worn political phrase. Free college is certainly not a new idea. Tuition-free schools have been around since the 19^th century.  Every time they have been tried, both in the U.S. and abroad, the results have been equivocal at best.[ix] A century ago, when less that 3% of young people went to college, the economic barriers to educational advancement certainly impeded the Nation’s progress. But now that over 40% of younger Americans at least give higher education a try, we need to question why they’re choosing this route over other reasonable alternatives (e.g., workplace training, military service, trade and technical schooling). Before establishing another entitlement program the U.S. can ill afford, we should consider what the educational experts have said about this. According to Sandy Baum of the Urban Institute:

“The reality is that when free college works – when the taxpayers are able and willing to pay for the full tuition for everyone – is when not too many people go to college.”[x]

There are no easy answers to the questions I’ve raised. Maybe, in the Information Age, we ought to spend as much as we possibly can on all forms of education, public, private or otherwise.  If we did, perhaps we wouldn’t need to explain over and over again why socialism doesn’t work, why your chances of succumbing to COVID-19 are far less than being killed today in a car accident, why climate change is not an extinction event, and why you would be better off using your own common sense than trusting the scaremongers in the partisan media.

In the meantime, whenever I’m invited to spend more of my money to fix something that hasn’t worked in decades, I’m going to use my public school acquired smarts and simply ask “why?”

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[i] In Ohio, a voter declares party affiliation at the time of voting. There is no other party registration process. In a presidential election year, having a Republican incumbent effectively makes Ohio’s March 17 election a Democratic-only primary.

[ii] Libby Nelson, “America spends more than $600 billion on schools. Here’s where it goes and why it matters,” Vox, March 25, 2015.

[iii] Stephanie Simon, “U.S. spends big on education, but results lag many nations: OECD”, Reuters, June 25, 2013.

[iv] “Is there a link between school spending and student achievement?”, Education Week, June 30, 2017.

[v] “Data: Breaking Down the Where and Why of K-12 Spending”, Education Week, September 24, 2019.

[vi] Libby Nelson, supra.

[vii] National Center for Education Statistics, Fast Facts, see https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=65

[viii] Jill Barshay, “The number of public school students could fall by more than 8% in a decade,” Hechinger Report, November 26, 2018.

[ix] Michael Stone, “What Happened When American States Tried Providing Tuition-Free College”, Time Magazine, April 4, 2016.

[x] Ibid.