> Funding per student is on the rise, or level on inflation-adjusted $

That's at the state level. But that doesn't account for the explosion in admin salaries and positions. The actual money a district spends on each student has been going down every year. Those funds are going more towards admin activities.

> I got ahold of all the teachers I knew and asked them what impact it would have, and their response was mostly that they would lose their school lunch benefits.

Teachers have a very poor understanding of where their funding comes from. Most just assume "property taxes", but it's far more complicated than that. The department of Ed provides a lot of funding to states that is passed through to the schools. They also enforce the education titles.

Cutting the department of Ed may not have a direct, immediate impact on classroom teachers, but it will have a large downstream effect in a few years.

> At the same time, school scores started to sag after 2014

That's around the time a bunch of districts in a state I lived in at the time had multi-year teacher pay scale freezes due to budget crunches. Not saying it's necessarily connected to the scores dropping, but still.

Total spending across the country may be high, but it's very much state-by-state and local how much is spent and where it goes. Some states pay teachers pretty well. Some states, the pay really is pretty awful. Some states are OK on staffing levels. Others are in an ongoing staffing catastrophe that's forcing them to cut school days to try to get by.

Meanwhile, school performance is heavily tied to home life and broader community support for students' families. That's why all this effort to improve schools hasn't been as effective as one might hope: the attention needs to go toward much harder problems that have little to do with schools and are really hard to get any progress on in the US. Worker protections, better and less-stressful "safety nets", better policing and a better justice system. That kind of thing. I'd look at least as much at what's been going on with those, and with security and home life for those in the lowest three quintiles of household income, as at schools themselves, to try to find reasons for trends like this.

That explosion plot is pretty bad. No y axis. Unclear if it includes tuition and loans (which are paid or owed by students). Loans are ~50% of "ED appropriations", and only ~$21 million was distributed to students in 2021. But in the plot is looks like spending was around 150 billion (hard to say with no y axis) but ~50% was loans? And the source is just a vague Dept of Ed, with a link at the very bottom of the page to every single table published by the Dept of Ed, so have fun checking the source.

I'm not criticizing your take, although I suspect teachers might lose more than their lunch, just pointing out how terrible the plot is.

To make your point even further, the US is near the global top in educational spending per student: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...

You should not adjust for inflation or even for wages, but for cost of employment. The way health insurance works in the US makes public sector jobs with average wages and good benefits expensive to the employer.

I met a forensic accountant recently who mentioned a corruption investigation she participated in involving a school district nearby, several high-ranking board members and admins were on the take. She pointed out the futility of the project, it was a large sum of money for a school district, but nothing like your headline-grabbing Medicare scams. She wound up leaving the investigation due to threats to her safety and took another job. It felt like one of those unresolved endings to "The Wire".

> When DJT talked about cancelling the Dept of Edu, I got ahold of all the teachers I knew and asked them what impact it would have, and their response was mostly that they would lose their school lunch benefits.

Not the most convincing sample size.

I'm not sure how to square that with the very well-studied result that areas with higher income tend to have better schools. Students from lower income brackets also do better than their income peers at schools in less affluent areas. And because local property taxes are a major funding source for schools, those are also the schools I'd expect to spend more because they have more.

Michigan notably does not fund schools through homeowner property taxes. I suspect that's probably the difference here and a reason we shouldn't use it as a representative example.

Since 2007? That was long after we chose to leave kids behind

This analysis is rather weak, just a linear regression with 2 variables it seems. I'm not saying there's a direct link of school spending and academic performance but this is barely trying. Your average undergrad could've made a better study.

It's worth pointing out that wages in the US are vast compared to other developed countries, though, too. We outspend OECD by 35-40%, but our average national wage is also higher than OECD by 35-40%.

How much of the school closures are because of declining enrollment? https://www.bostonindicators.org/article-pages/2024/june/emp... https://www.bu.edu/articles/2025/public-school-enrollment-do...

If filling a leaky bucket had almost no impact over time, why would stopping filling the bucket have an impact?

Unfortunately there is much more to the story than a number on a line. Just because you increase spending doesn't mean that the spending isn't earmarked for items like digital projectors and virtual textbooks that have minimal impact on learning outcomes.

>If increasing spending had almost no impact over time why would cutting spending have an impact?

big if true. we should probably cut 100% of spending in that case.

edit: not sure if people are missing the /s, or if people legitimately believe that cutting spending has no impact.

So shifting this malpractice to private schooling will yield better results? Cmon we'll get bilked ten times worse. Or we'll end up with christian-taught homeschooled kids that make Georgia look like a premier educational state. And they still won't speak georgian

Edit: actually, this is an insult to Georgia. I apologize, brothers and sisters. You have much to teach us.

google sez:

"Inflation-adjusted public school funding per student in the United States has increased significantly over the long term, with a roughly 34% increase in inflation-adjusted revenue per student over the last two decades alone. Looking at a broader historical view, inflation-adjusted spending per student has risen by over 200% since the 1960s."

This is the bias that keeps us from actually making improvements to the education system. I guess it's easy to repeat and blame money. Kind of like a brilliantly colored red herring.

>It's weird you're using Alaska as an example

its weird that they used the state that they live in and have lived in for the last 20 years as an example?

Public schools are not subsidizing charter schools. Rather per-student money travels with those kids to the school they are actually attending. So since the kids don't go to those schools, neither does the money.

I don't know what state you are in, and there are a number of them where the charter systems are absolute messes and have become fraud paradises (looking at you Florida), but other states things are much better.

Fo instance my kids are in charter schools in California. All charter schools here are required to have tiered lotteries to get in, and after siblings and teachers' kids, the first tier is always kids with an IEP (the problematic/expensive ones). And at my kids school we know one of the kids with a severe problems that the school has bent over backwards to provide the best environment for that little girl.

And every 4 years they have to re-apply for their charter, and one of the front-and-center numbers required for that is how many kids they kick out. And they got grilled on that (which our school passed with flying colors). The charters absolutely had to prove that they are doing things better than the local schools, and our school worked very hard to prove that (and had the numbers to do so). If they didn't, then their charter would have been cut (we heard about other schools that failed this grade).

So I am experiencing a well run charter school, inside a well policed system (California). If you are not, then make that one of the things you cast your vote on: regulations on where your school dollars flow to.

I will note that there is one important advantage that charter schools have: you have to make a choice to get into them. That means that the parents tend to be more involved in their kids' education (if only minority so), and so you get kids that are a bit more motivated to do well. This one area is unfair to the public schools.

Parents watching what their kids were learning (or not learning) was probably the largest acceleration into home and alternate school in history. That's what happened to nearly every family in our home school co-op.

As GP noted, there are multiple factors here. They're not arguing funding is the only factor.

My hypothesis is that for us, now post studying in the "old ways", are able to use these tools to increase learning.

The fundamental problem seems to be that screens as a basis for learning how to learn, study, and retain information in kids appears to be detrimental to developing that core skill we have already developed.

This gave me flashbacks to LonCapa in college when I was in calculus classes circa 2011. A correct answer was marked incorrect automatically because of floating point issues.

I agree with you 100%. It's a system that punishes and stifles innovation.

Absolutely, we are feeding kids so much attention-span killing things. Even as an adult I'm having hard time with YouTube shorts, and i cannot imagine a kids brain having the ways to deal with all that.

That doesn't line up though. See if you're 13 and meeting the level in 2012 your scores don't decline. So the levels would lag a few years. The 8 year-olds show up and miss the mark in 2017 that indicate the infinite scroll problem was having a toll on them. Additionally this would start to show in class specific measurements (those kids with access to home internet, personal devices, etc. would have worse scores). I think the argument about social media has merit in discussion of children, but it seems more of a social distinction rather than an objective indicator for academic performance.

I wonder if there's research on short form but educational content or if that's fundamentally impossible.

For example I remember reading a lot of science magazines / articles growing up (granted popsci but for a kid it still teaches some things) and as I grew up things like the Economist.

Similarly I also played games like math blaster as a kid and have realized I need to intentionally provide games like this to my kids that ideally teach something (the bar being greater than zero learning) rather than playing one of those infinite running games or whatever.

I think we're probably talking about the exact same thing but am curious where content vs. short form media is.

Thanks for sharing :)

I certainly feel several degrees dumber than I did as a teenager without that stuff

Could we look at average SAT scores by year as a proxy? It's not a great metric because not all students take the SAT but I think there's some correlation.

https://blog.prepscholar.com/average-sat-scores-over-time

Score changes look about the same across performance percentiles and ethnicities. That suggests it's a systemic issue unrelated to population makeup. While I'd be interested to see regional and economic breakdowns, it's certainly far from obvious it's a result of demographic change, especially after such a short period of time.

Mississippi is one of the recent education success stories though.

I wouldn’t be so sure. Anecdotally all the kids these days seem equally messed up. It could be that the Chinese and Indian kids are propping up the locals.

Off the top of my head I don't have problem with this, but the topic is about declining scores so I'm not sure how relevant this is.

Yes. That's the whole idea of adaptive/personalized learning.

There are some interesting ethical questions about disparity of outcomes, but we should aim to have a system that educates each individual as best we can (without leaving kids behind). The current system of bludgeoning every individual student to be the same is not working well.

Always used to be the case, is that no longer an option?

No, because you’ll end up really dysfunctional if you’re a child in a class with 18 year olds.

Absolutely

Who is blaming the students? If 13 year olds were smoking and we blamed poor sports performance in that age group on the smoking, we wouldn't be "blaming" them. We don't model 13 year olds as little islands of free will.

Chronic absence is up and truancy is down according to this report. Not really what I’d expect for phone use—both should trend flat or up.

I wonder if there’s a way to validate the hypothesis that post-shutdown, some of the cohort that would have missed a day here and there now see school as optional and miss more days.

Overall, the reported effect is sad and should be addressed. These are people’s lives.

I would bet on a culture of lowered expectations.

It's also not possible to carry around enough books with you to allow you to jump from one to another whenever you get bored, while it is possible to effectively carry around a device that lets you watch YouTube/TikTok at all times. I think this is an important factor.

Plenty of children suffer in public schools as they are currently constituted. School vouchers, school choice, and attacking teachers unions are attempts to create more schooling options than just whatever the local public school is, which should benefit children who are currently having a bad time in that system.

School boards are inherently poltical because as long as a publicly-run school system exists, how it is run and what things it will attempt to teach are political questions. There's no apolitical school board that existed 40 years ago that has been altered since then, they have always been poltical.

Internet commenters try to get me to hate lots of people for lots of reasons, but "Parents trying to send their kid to a school that fits their kid's needs" seems like such a hard sell.

Like, I get the desire in a hypothetical, that you hope that people in power would use their power to make public schools better if their kids were forced to go there.

But in reality, the actually powerful can just pay for private schools out of pocket and the vouchers help a lot of middle-income families send their kid to a school that can provide a better environment for whatever definition of better is relevant to that individual.

It just seems like such misplaced anger and energy. You could just advocate for improving public schools, without attacking regular families trying to do their best while trapped inside a system they have very little influence on.

And yet, the SF school district decided that math is too racist, and advanced classes in particular should be banned as doubleplusungood.

Seattle's Public Schools district is among the leading in the nation on per-student spending, yet the test scores are cratering. Its previous superintendant had an official platform of not disciplining students.

Vouchers would _improve_ the situation.

> Who do you think suffers when elites attack public education? It's always the children.

Exactly. And who benefits from a less educated, less aware populace? The answer is pretty clear: look at who is benefiting right now!

At least in elementary school I don't see the deficiency in common core math compared to what I had 30 years ago. My kid has been exposed to a wide variety of topics sooner than I was, and she's way stronger in word problems on top of that. Do people have a specific complaint with elementary school common core math that we should be teaching but aren't, or vice versa? Or is it more problematic later?

Except that's not what the data shows. The decrease is similar across performance levels.

So sorry, I'm from Califurnia

Please don’t do this.

Covid doesn't explain the drop from 2012 to 2020 though, as the tests were administered Fall of 2019 and therefore pre-Covid.

They want to say that non-whites are naturally dumber than whites. There will be varying degrees of subtlety but that's what the dog whistlers are on about.

Haha, I wouldn't actually say anything (sarcasm never transfers on the internet). More of it's interesting that many baby boomers I know in real life think the sky is falling based on metrics that are better than they were when they were kids, and they didn't even have COVID as an excuse.

Because _real_ study is boring. Watching videos on Youtube or playing "educational games" is not studying.

You need to repeatedly solve multiple practical problems to internalize the knowledge. And you'll eventually need to do stuff that you don't really like at all.