Do Americans Think We Spend Too Much On Education?
Cost-cutting is all the rage in education policy. This makes a lot of sense during a recession (the next few yearswill be brutal), and even during good times we all want money to be well-spent. But much of the discussion on this topic is less about weathering the storm than about a long-term effort to stop the growth of spending on public education. The underlying assumption, hardly unique to education policy, is that people are tired of increasing school costs, and want to start cutting back.
So, I wanted to take a quick look at what Americans think of education spending, now and over time, using data from the General Social Survey (1972-2008), a nationally representative sample of U.S. opinions and other characteristics (run by the National Opinion Research Center). The question queries whether respondents