There is very little more essential to a free society than universal literacy and adequate public education. It is a civil rights issue. It is the foundation for absolutely everything else.
To fail here is to lastingly abandon a significant fraction of our children to a lifelong struggle.
Quote is from The Argument’s post in September on the Mississippi Miracle.
Following thoughts are from: https://reason.org/k12-ed-spending/2025-spotlight/
- The funding metric they focus on is $/student spent
- That’s been going up sharply from their measured years: 2002 – 2023
- Funding is increasingly going towards teacher benefits, not salary: “for every new $1 that public schools spent on employee salaries between 2002 and 2023, benefit expenditures rose by $3.27.”
- The benefit expenditure is largely going towards paying teacher pension commitments that have been underfunded
- “bulk of new K-12 hires were non-teachers, which increased by 22.8%, such as counselors, social workers, speech pathologists, and instructional aides”
- number of teachers rose 7.6% during from 2002-2023
- they make a note that the most well-funded states have lost a lot of students (e.g. CA -318,532 since 2020) but had added more non-teaching staff members (e.g. CA 3,400) at the same time
- doesn’t immediately make me think it’s some sin to hire more staff, even non-teachers, even while losing students, because the education environment is so complex and changing (much different than when I was in high school (2008-2011)) that this may be a necessary inconvenience to combat dynamic issues
- meaning, if you look at this as a whole, spending more money for the administrative state, while losing students, doesn’t sound good. but, what, and who, it takes to serve a population of students with challenges like The Phones, anxiety, low-belief in a good future, etc. may be necessary
- The brain drain in Vermont & New Hampshire’s public schools…?
- Vermont growth rate from 2002-2023: -17.3%, and from 2020-2023: -3.6%
- New Hampshire growth rate from 2002-2023: -18.3%, and from 2020-2023: -4.8%
- Real salaries are declining: average fell from $75,151 in 2002 to $70,548 in 2022
- Most of that % drop happened during the COVID-19 pandemic
- Declined most in NC!! -9.6%
- Over this same period, while teacher salaries didn’t rise, “public school revenue grew by 25%”
- They cite a theory on why salaries didn’t grow, but say it’s unconfirmed:
- “Because teacher pay is tied to years of experience and educational attainment—and teacher salaries vary substantially by state—it’s also possible that demographic shifts in the teacher population contributed to the observed trends. However, available federal data make it difficult to draw firm conclusions. While the share of teachers with over 20 years of experience has declined, educational attainment has increased, with the proportion of teachers holding only a bachelor’s degree falling over time.”
- Inflation probably also ate up teacher salaries
- Their conclusion: strong headwinds, use funding wisely to face them
My basic takeaway is:
Funding is pretty much up across the board. Revenue is up (don’t know what generates revenue). Enrollment is down. Staff growth is majority in non-teacher roles. I’m interested in how necessary that is based on the current slate of challenges young people face. It’s not obvious to me that more funding = bad or that less funding = better educational results. But, it seems important that a growing % of the funding should go towards higher real teacher pay and better educational results. My guess is talent is probably one of the primary things that would solve this: smart, kind, and effective people running these schools and districts.
This all relates to the Mississippi Miracle. Mississippi’s in the top 20 of $/student spent, though much lower overall to the top 5 spenders, but they’re also seeing strong educational results specifically in reading.
The post I read on the Mississippi Miracle says the three things that worked, and worked in Louisiana and Tennessee and a few other southern states too, were:
- teach phonics, instead of the whole language method (looking at sentence context and then guessing at the word).
- require elementary school teachers be trained on the science of reading. lots of continuing training for teacher goes to waste (according to the post) but this ensures it’s worth it.
- accountability: “clear accountability at the district level, at the school level, at the educator level, and at the student and parent level”
- “In Mississippi, a child who isn’t capable of reading at the end of third grade has to repeat the grade — a policy called third grade retention.”
Probably hard to know how much of the Mississippi Miracle in reading is related to their amount of funding, and how much it’s gone up, but the folks recounting the success don’t just say: money did it.