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.”