Rutgers education professor Bruce Baker thinks I'm getting all bubbly when I claim that there's been a spending bubble in U.S. education in recent years.
The new ?reform? story line is that all states have been spending out of control they have taxed their citizenry to death and have spent most of that money hiring more and more teachers even while student populations have stagnated. Further, we have done all of this out of control spending and class size reduction while seeing absolutely no return for our dollar! Pretty simple! Very compelling, eh? NO.
When one takes a look at individual states?in terms of relative tax burden, changes in tax burden over time?in terms of changes in pupil to teacher ratios over time?and in terms of student outcomes in relation to pupil to teacher ratios and tax burdens?it's pretty damn hard to find states which actually fit that story line. And public K-12 education is largely a state and local endeavor, not a federal one.
Now, Baker is right to point out that there's plenty of state and district variation in school spending, so it's likely that at least a few states or districts got left out of the recent spending spree. (He points to Utah, California, and Arizona in particular.) Still, according to this trusty chart from the National Center on Education Statistics (quoting its accompanying report): ?Adjusting for inflation, current expenditures per pupil have grown 32 percent since FY 95 and 60 percent since FY 85.?
Surely most states and districts saw big increases in order for the national average to rise 32 percent since the mid-1990s. And can anyone possibly look at this fact?spending has risen by one-third in just fifteen years?and not call it a spending bubble?
Oh, but that's where Bruce gets really tricky. He says it's not a bubble because it wasn't the result of tax increases. (Or at least that's what I think he's saying, since he's so interested in looking at ?tax burden? over time.) So what, because the spending bubble was driven by the dot-com bubble, and then the housing bubble, it's not a bubble? A bubble is a bubble is a bubble!
Here's the bottom line: a soaring economy and stock market in the 1990s allowed states to push education spending ever higher, and a housing bubble in the 2000s allowed states (and districts) to continue the trend. Now the money is gone. States and local districts with either have to tax the heck out of themselves to keep the status quo in place (which does not look likely) or the education system is going to have to learn to live with less. What goes up must come down. But the good news is schools can balance their budgets not through ?draconian? cuts but by returning to a way of life circa 1995. That's no reason to break out the bubbly, but it's not the end of the world, either.
?Mike Petrilli
