After eight days of prodding from Corey DeAngelis of the Reason Foundation, the Washington Post has corrected an op-ed about public-school spending. The thesis of the op-ed, by the head of the University of Virginia’s education school, is that we have not been spending enough money on public schools.
The op-ed originally asserted that such spending has fallen in inflation-adjusted terms since the late 1980s. It has in fact increased, as the correction notes.
It’s not a minor change. The false claim was key to the op-ed’s argument that we need to make a course correction. Without it, the op-ed is left arguing that more spending would turn things around while quietly conceding that we’ve already tried it and it hasn’t yielded promising results.