The Underfunding Myth Is Exposed

A rare column from New York Times staff writer and the 1619 Project author Nikole Hannah-Jones ignited a firestorm this past week around her decision to send her daughter to an academically stunted public school for social justice reasons. But in questioning how that decision affected her child (if not the rigid political beliefs that drove her to sacrifice her kid’s education), Hannah-Jones makes a tacit admission rarely encountered in legacy media: Money is not the problem at America’s many failing schools.

“I knew that P.T.A.s at poor schools often can raise only a few thousand dollars, but [my husband] Faraji and I could write checks that exceeded the annual P.T.A. budget,” wrote Hannah-Jones, in setting up the story of how her checks and privileged advocacy failed to make a measurable difference in the low standards, disorder, and general dysfunction of her daughter’s school.

Even the writer does not seem to explicitly acknowledge that her cash infusions did little. Several paragraphs later, she’s back to beating the comforting drum of systemic underfunding. Progressives also might have a ready retort to any attempt to read deeply into her anecdote: Well, surely you can’t expect a single family to make up a school-sized shortfall with a PTA check, no matter how generous.

Hang on to your seat, dear reader, when I tell you that the New York City Department of Education says it spent, this year at that very school, P.S. 307 in Brooklyn, around $44,000 per student — and, when including other wraparound services, a whopping $58,000 per student.

Hannah-Jones is not alone in her assumptions about school spending. The average American wildly underestimates how much money is funneled into the public education system. High-poverty urban districts like the one in which P.S. 307 resides, contrary to another pervasive myth, usually boast annual revenues considerably higher than the typical middle-class or even upper-middle class district. The vast majority — nearly three-quarters — of voters underestimate per-pupil spending, sometimes dramatically. The most common guess for per-pupil funding is about $5,000 per kid, which is less than half the money spent in the lowest-spending state in the union. The real national average is triple that.

A lot of effort has gone into circulating this pervasive lie, which looms over practically all discussions and debates about public schools across the country. Teachers’ union representatives, as one would expect, never tire of repeating it. But dissemination of the myth that we just don’t spend enough on our public schools hasn’t been limited to adults whose salaries depend on it. News outlets continually repeat the claim, and even many state courts take it as an unexamined premise that underfunding is a major problem in public education, setting floors for legislative spending justified by a misguided notion of advancing equal opportunity.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the lie is reinforced by the real shortages in classrooms that parents encounter. Families reasonably assume that if their third grader’s teacher is begging for supplies at the beginning of the school year to avoid purchasing them out of her own salary, then there must not be enough in the kitty. In Hannah-Jones’s essay, for example, the tolerance for constant physical fights in the cafeteria is blamed on “understaffing” caused by a lack of funds.

Instead, the reality is that these shortages are produced by the education establishment’s spending decisions, which prioritize absurd bureaucratic bloat and pensions over basic classroom needs. Non-teaching positions have exploded by more than 700 percent since the 1950s, and just since the 1990s, money spent on administrative salaries has far outstripped that spent on teachers. In some states, the classroom basics-to-union-graft ratio can only be described as impressive; in Illinois, less than 10 percent of every new dollar spent on “education” goes to anything people would recognize as educational, namely school buildings, teacher salaries, and teaching materials. A popular documentary back in 2009, The Cartel, tried to chase down some of these dollars that were earmarked for a New Jersey classroom, and even found plenty of old-school corruption, like huge construction contracts going to family members of school employees.

Nor is the link between spending more money and school performance well supported by the data. The late Andrew Coulson of the Cato Institute famously circulated a gut-punch chart plotting federal spending increases against National Assessment of Educational Progress score changes; the former skyrockets up from the 1970s onward, while the latter is flat enough to be a Kansas skyline.

But the lie, unfortunately, works. Seventy-five to 80 percent of education bonds placed before voters pass; Americans are usually more willing to open their pocketbooks for schools than for other tax increases. And finding out that their estimates on school spending are wildly off has a huge impact on voter opinions, with the percentage of voters saying education spending is “too low” plummeting from above 70 percent to an underwater 40 merely by encountering the numerical fact as reported by a reputable media outlet. By remaining silent about the numbers while propagating misleading insinuations about underfunding, legacy media outlets are getting the outcome the left wants from purposely uninformed voters.

The worst thing about the big underfunding lie, though, isn’t the taxpayer dollars stolen from the pockets of an already-struggling American middle class, exploiting Americans’ goodwill toward “the children” with a false impression of educational impoverishment. No, it’s that “we don’t spend enough” has been a shield against reform and against outrage toward the absolutely criminal performance of the public school system across the board. It’s a shield that is finally — at long last — showing some cracks, and the post-Covid school choice explosion in many states will hopefully bear fruit for hundreds of thousands of American students.

But now, even the New York Times has unwittingly admitted that the crisis in American education isn’t about the money.