The Myth of Underfunding
Michael Van Beek at Michigan Capitol Confidential makes a strong– irrefutable, it seems to me– argument that the idea that public schools are underfunded is a myth.
He’s talking about the state of funding in Michigan, but most of what he says can be applied to schools in any state:
The underfunding myth rests on an assumption that there exists some known “price” for a public school education that taxpayers are failing to meet. In fact, no such figure exists. All we have are the amounts actually spent on schools and the knowledge that they have consistently increased each year for at least the last five decades.
In Michigan, Van Beek, points out, per pupil spending has quadrupled from 1960 to 2007, as measured in 2007 dollars, and $55 dollars out of every $1,000 in state personal income goes to public schools. (The national average, he says,is $43 out of every $1,000.)
Michigan charter schools educate kids for about $2200 (25%) less per student than their regular public school counterparts, leading Van Beek to suggest that there’s more of a problem of taxpayers being “overcharged” than of schools being underfunded.
One thing that’s often omitted from “school funding is down” stories, Van Beek says, is the effect of declining enrollment. Because school funding is allotted by states on a per pupil basis, when a school’s enrollment drops, so does the funding. That’s because there are fewer kids in the school to educate.
Van Beek concludes that the real source of money problems for schools is not underfunding:
The real reason for school money troubles is not “underfunding,” but a failure to contain employee costs that comprise about 80 percent of operational budgets. As long as school boards continue to agree to contracts that grant school employees, particularly teachers, automatic pay increases and lavish benefits packages that outpace comparable private-sector averages and the ability of taxpayers to support, schools will never have “adequate” funding.
The beneficiaries of those unsustainable benefits have a strong incentive to promote the “underfunding” myth, but taxpayers should exercise a healthy measure of skepticism. On the whole, Michigan schools have more resources available than ever before, and receive a larger portion of state and local tax revenues than almost any other state.
This article is dead-on in Ohio. I’ve seen statistical analyses of real income in districts in Ohio where the average taxpayers’ wages have decreased by 9-10% in real dollars over the last couple decades while average teacher salaries have increased 45-50%. This is AFTER adjusting for inflation, and without considering the incredibly generous benefits packages afforded public employees in Ohio. I think this disparity is the real reason why schools in many areas of the state have such a difficult time passing levies. People look around and see that by and large, the teachers they know are doing better than many others.