As the nearly two dozen Democrats seeking to be president clamor up the greasy pole toward their nomination, some are already promising to dramatically boost the flow of federal dollars to America’s public schools. It has long been orthodoxy among Democrats that per-pupil spending, if we just raise it high enough, will magically translate into more learning.
Unfortunately, that belief is not supported by fact. As education researcher Dr. Greg Forster has noted, “One of the most important and consistent lessons of education reform efforts in the past century is that policies focused on insuring monetary inputs do not produce results.”
Increased per-pupil spending, Forster adds, has only resulted in flat or even worsening indicators of learning. “Empirical studies,” he concludes, “looking for a relationship between education spending and outcomes have consistently failed to find one.”
That is true if we dig into the data from my home state of Oklahoma, and by extension in others as well. Since most Oklahoma high school seniors take the ACT college entrance exam, it is an ideal measure of K-12 learning. Analysis of data from 2017 shows that Oklahoma seniors averaged 19.5 on the ACT. Any school where the average was below 17.0 could thus be said to be performing poorly; those schools where seniors averaged 21.0 or better were clearly succeeding in transmitting more learning.
For 2017, there were 78 Oklahoma schools with ACT averages below 17.0. The average per-pupil expenditure in those schools was $9,662. The state average was $7,668 that year, so the bottom 78 schools spent just over $2,000 more per student.
During the same school year, 38 schools averaged 21.0 or better. The average per-pupil spending there was $7,677, almost $2,000 less than in the 78 failing schools and right on the state average. So it seems that the more some schools spent, the less capable the students were.
Some schools presented stark examples of how simply spending more fails to yield more learning. The small Billings school district had the worst ACT average in the state, a dismal 13.3. Per-pupil spending there was $14,310. Davidson spent $13,305 per student but only yielded an ACT average of 13.8.
Conversely, some of the high performing schools reaped those results on minimal budgets. The Classen Academy school in Oklahoma City had the highest ACT average in the state, at 25.9, while spending $8,323 per pupil. Just a few miles away, other Oklahoma City high schools showed ACT scores between 14 and 16 with the same spending average.
The same holds true in Tulsa, where most high schools produced weak ACT scores in the 14-15 range on $8,659 per pupil, while two — Washington and Edison Prep, both magnet schools — churned out ACT grads averaging 22.7 and 21.4 respectively at the same exact spending level.
What are those successful schools doing? They are spending their available dollars on rigorous academic programs where the prime focus is on learning. In fact, there’s another telling data point about both school lists. The best-performing schools offered an average of 77 high school courses; the 78 poor performers only made some 41 classes available, and some, like the pathetic school in Billings, provided a course offering of just 25.
It turns out that it isn’t how much you spend, it’s how and where you spend it. Many smaller Oklahoma schools are handicapped by a proliferation of more than 500 districts with excessive administrative costs. Yet the same advocates of spending more steadfastly resist any effort at school consolidation.
Magnet schools, charter schools, schools where the focus is learning, well-run schools that control non-classroom costs — these are the true paths to improved learning, and not simply blindly dumping more billions into the federal education cornucopia. Hopefully at least one of the many presidential candidates will admit that truth.
Mike Brake is a writer for the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs.
