Experts say increased spending doesn't mean better students

By Esther Wickham
The Center Square 

Spending more taxpayer dollars doesn't make kids smarter, according to experts.

As K-12 test scores and student proficiency rates continue to decline nationwide, education experts question whether increased education funding is improving student outcomes or merely contributing to inefficiencies within the public school system.

National Assessment of Educational Progress data released in 2024 show that the average reading score for 12th-grade students fell three points since 2019 and is 10 points lower than the first assessment in 1992. Average math scores for 12th graders have also declined by three points since 2019.  

Critics argue the issue is not a lack of funding, but how education dollars are being spent

“We don’t have an education funding problem. We have an education spending problem,” Ryan Walters, CEO of Teacher Freedom Alliance, told The Center Square. 

Walters said increased funding has often gone toward administrative bloat rather than students and teachers. He said schools should be raising academic standards, improving accountability and implementing school choice programs to give parents more control over their children’s education. 

"School choice is a huge factor in this. We need that universally across the country so that if schools are low performing and they don't want to shape up, parents should be able to take their kids somewhere else," Walters said.

School choice also puts parents in the driver seat of their kids' education, which can impact administrators responsiveness to decision making, Walters added.  

Nationally, public K-12 schools spent almost $1 trillion in 2024, while the average per-pupil spending nears $18,000. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, public school revenue increased 16% between the 2010 and 2020 school years, adjusting for inflation. 

Patrick Graff, senior fellow with the American Federation for Children, said the decline in student performance began before the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Graff pointed to chronic absenteeism, increased classroom screen time and declining academic standards as major contributors to lower performances. According to NAEP, 31% of 12th-grade students reported missing three or more days of school in the month before taking the 2024 assessment. 

Graff said accountability systems have weakened over time, as schools focus more on graduation rates and metrics. He pointed to the expansion of credit recovery programs, which allow students who fail a class to complete online coursework to regain credit. 

“A graduation rate used to be a much stronger signal in terms of how well a high school is able to move their kids through and get them to reach a bar or graduation,” Graff said. “And over time, a lot of the standards underneath that high school graduation metric have really eroded.”

To ensure accountability, Graff said, schools should receive meaningful feedback from students, parents and teachers to encourage long-term academic growth rather than just meeting performance benchmarks. 

Graff noted spending more money does not solve the underlying issues in public education. 

“That is a big kind of background crisis within education right now. A lot of people are calling to just spend more, and they just trust that that will lead to better outcomes,” Graff said. “But there are many states in which they have spent a lot more, and they're doing a good bit worse.”

Graff pointed to Oregon as a “cautionary tale.”

In Oregon, inflation-adjusted education spending has increased by roughly 45% over the past decade. 

Per-pupil spending reached $17,988 during the 2022-23 school year, nearly double the amount spent two decades earlier, according to Common Sense Institute. Despite the increase, Oregon ranked in the bottom nationally in academic outcomes.

Statewide testing in Oregon showed 42.5% of students were proficient in English language arts and 31% were proficient in math.

The solution can’t be throwing more money into a broken system, Graff said.

“I think that has been the case in a lot of states where you don't have a system that is responsive enough to parents and students and their needs, and instead being more responsive to the needs of adults in the system,” he said. 

The Center Square reached out to the Oregon Department of Education, but did not receive a response.