There’s also one other problem with flooding schoolyards with money. It doesn’t do much to improve the performance of school kids. For example, here’s an item from Kansas. It’s a recent study, conducted by Dr. Florence Neymotin for the University of Kansas’s Center for Applied Economics, that shows no correlation between pennies from heaven and marks on an SAT.

Kansas’s nutty supreme court mandated a huge funding increase for education in 2005. The result so far: No improvement in student performance, but the state’s now looking ahead to a $1 billion deficit (in a state with a population the size of Kansas, that’s like real money), most of which was caused by the education funding fiasco.

The one thing pouring money on education does do is expand government as schools are turned into welfare centers, etc. It’s like a fertilizer of unintended consequences. (Although I guess maybe that particular consequence is kind of intentional in this case. Still stinks, though.)