Too Much Is Never Enough: the Big Lie About Education Spending
"Most of our problems could be solved by properly funding public education" is Left Twitter's (sorry, X!) cause du jour, and before you fall asleep of boredom, there's something important here, a fundamental part of the argument that the Right keeps getting wrong. It's why we keep losing — and why our schools keep getting worse.
Big-time X user John Collins used the platform on Friday to push for — surprise! — more or "proper" spending on education, just after President-elect Donald Trump selected school-choice proponent Linda McMahon for his Education Secretary amid musings of closing down the department entirely. Naturally, Democrats responded with their usual hysteria.
You can't blame them, either. "Education," and I use those scare quotes advisedly, is one of the Democrats' biggest gravy trains and probably the biggest. Derail the federal education gravy train, and the Donks are in deep doo-doo.
I'm here to tell you that we don't just need to spend our education dollars properly but that we need to spend a lot less — and that if we do the former, the latter will virtually take care of itself. To show you what I mean by that, here's how things blew up on X over the weekend after IWF's Inez Stepman replied to Collins's "properly funding education" tweet.
X's Community Notes got in on the action, too, reminding users that "Federal, state, and local governments provide $878.2 billion or $17,700 per pupil to fund K-12 public education" and that "This figure has increased every year, while public school effectiveness and scores have decreased every year."
Community Notes also provided handy links to back up those figures, which you can find here and here.
And Another Thing: John Collins — or whatever his name is — is one of those inexplicably "Twitter famous" people. He's anonymous, his takes rarely (if that often) rise above predictable, and yet he has 200,000-plus followers. I'm not sure how that happens unless it involves bot farms supported by well-funded lefty outfits.
By sticking with the phony "dollars per pupil metric," conservatives are once again playing the game by the Left's rules.
There's never too much money spent on students — don't you love the children?
But we aren't spending all that money on the students. Or even teachers' salaries. We're spending most of those spending increases on administrators. Here's where the growth in education spending — funded in no small part by federal largess — has gone:
Another culprit is employee benefits. "A closer look at school finance data reveals that increased administrative spending hasn’t been the line item devouring most new education money in recent decades," Reason reported in 2021. "The real culprit is the ballooning cost of employee benefits." To be fair, though, an awful lot — too damn many — of those employees getting the pricy benefits are... you guessed it... administrators.
If conservatives are going to win the argument on shutting down the Department of So-Called Education, we have to stop using the Left's "spending per student" metric because it just isn't true. Start talking about "spending per useless deadweight administrator," and maybe we'll get somewhere.
Get rid of the administrative deadweight and all the red tape they impose, and local districts will be forced to spend their dollars wisely — on the students for a change.
