In the latest edition of the Hoover Institution’s Education Next journal, James Guthrie and Arthur Peng offer an excellent explanation of a common phenomenon: public-school administrators and politicians constantly crying wolf about impending budget cuts that never really come to pass. Recessions bite most industries, and the Great Recession has chewed up some industries beyond recognition, but when it comes to the government school monopoly, the flock seems never to be in real danger:

For a variety of reasons, from one year to the next, schools almost always have more real revenue for each of their enrolled students. For the past hundred years, with rare and short exceptions and after controlling for inflation, public schools have had both more money and more employees per student in each succeeding year. Teacher salaries have increased more than 42 percent in constant dollars over the past half century, while educators’ working conditions, health plans, and retirement arrangements have become ever more commodious. Moreover, school-related revenues and employment levels have increased even when the economy (as measured by Gross Domestic Product or GDP) turned down, unlike what typically happens in sectors such as manufacturing and retail sales, where recessions trigger cutbacks in personnel and profits.

Of course, all these steadily increasing appropriations might be less worrisome if student achievement rose in proportion. But it hasn’t, and won’t. The most recent treatment of that subject I’ve read is Schoolhouses, Courthouse, and Statehouses, by Eric Hanushek and Alfred Lindseth. Highly recommended.