Which States Snag The Most K-12 Cash From Everyone Else?
Mississippi, Louisiana, South Dakota, New Mexico, and Arizona must love U.S. taxpayers for sending them so much K-12 money for lackluster education.
The five states with the biggest appetite for federal K-12 cash are Mississippi, Louisiana, South Dakota, New Mexico, and Arizona, according to an analysis of new federal data by a Kentucky researcher. Congress just approved another increase in education spending above and beyond five decades of exploding K-12 spending despite flatlined student results and research showing spending above a basic minimum has no effect on student achievement.
Richard Innes’s chart below shows how much each state spends on each student each year (minus capital costs such as school bonds, which can be extensive), and ranks states according to what proportion of that spending comes from the whole country’s taxpayers via the federal government. Looks like Mississippi taxpayers should be super grateful to the rest of us, to say the least. But they’re not the only ones. Find your state below.
The Cato Institute chart below depicts the massive increase in federal education spending against an utter lack of improvement among American students. This is one of many pieces of evidence showing that big influxes of federal cash don’t help students learn more. The top five states binging on everyone else’s K-12 money also help confirm this reality, as national test results show their students at or below average. Mississippi, Louisiana, and New Mexico are among the five worst performers of all states, and Arizona and South Dakota are merely average.
A large chunk of federal money goes directly to state-level bureaucrats, giving them a big reason to support higher federal education spending. As Rep. Scott Garrett of New Jersey points out (perhaps not coincidentally because New Jersey is the biggest education tax loser), the Congressional Budget Office says federal mandates cause 41 percent of state-level administrative costs despite supplying just 7 percent of the average state’s education funding.
In other words, federal requirements cost approximately six times as much as federal money supplies, if you only calculate state-level costs. A number of state studies conducted in the wake of No Child Left Behind found that federal regulations cost local taxpayers even more than they do state taxpayers. Yet state leaders keep demanding federal money even though in the end it costs them more than rejecting it. A new federal study found teachers reporting paperwork takes them an hour or two every Which States Snag The Most K-12 Cash From Everyone Else?:
