> When school budgets are cut and underpaid teachers leave the industry "Oh, that's just the free hand of the market."
Are school budgets being cut? I keep hearing people saying they are, but the US Department of Education says the opposite [1]: that per-pupil spending (adjusted for inflation) has increased greatly over the past century or so, and its trajectory has almost always been upward. What's the deal?
(My best shot at a steelman is that either (a) the money has been disappearing down a mysterious rabbit hole and so teacher pay hasn't risen as much as the raw budget numbers would lead you to think, or that (b) teachers are underpaid relative to what they could get in other occupations that have seen more per-worker productivity growth, i.e. the Baumol effect.)
Absolutely! Sometimes it's explicitly sold as an education budget cut (like Texas in 2011, narrowly averted in 2021 but there was a whole campaign for it), and occasionally it's cloaked in carrot/stick incentives where district that "excel" get more money, and the underperfoming ones get less. The lately, there's an attempt in red states to go around Brown v. (IMO) by promoting tax-funded charter schools, which take money away from public schools - so, technically the budget hasn't been cut, but public school districts (and schools) are getting less money.
Are school budgets being cut? I keep hearing people saying they are, but the US Department of Education says the opposite [1]: that per-pupil spending (adjusted for inflation) has increased greatly over the past century or so, and its trajectory has almost always been upward. What's the deal?
(My best shot at a steelman is that either (a) the money has been disappearing down a mysterious rabbit hole and so teacher pay hasn't risen as much as the raw budget numbers would lead you to think, or that (b) teachers are underpaid relative to what they could get in other occupations that have seen more per-worker productivity growth, i.e. the Baumol effect.)
[1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_236.55.a...