Shortchanging Our Children, Our Schools, and Our Future
In a new report by the Urban Institute entitled Kids’ Share 2016, the authors found that state and local spending on education declined dramatically during the Great Recession. Co-author Julia Issacs writes, “As the economy turned downward in late 2008, local revenues fell with the drop in property values, and state revenues fell with declines in earning and income.”
In response to the recession, safety net programs like Medicaid provided additional support to a growing number of people living in poverty, including children. However, states cut other areas of their budgets, such as education in order to balance their budgets. According to Isaacs, state and local spending on education dropped by $36 billion from 2008 to 2011 or “by more than $400 per child between 2008 and 2010.”
Fortunately, federal support for education, as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), increased during the period and helped compensate for the drop in state and local support for education.Isaacs adds, “Between 2008 and 2010, federal spending on education increased by more than $370 per child. As a result, total spending on education remained fairly steady at about $8,000 per child in 2008–10.”
The bad news, according to the Kids’ Share 2016 report, is that federal support for education has dropped from a high of $74 billion in 2010 to $41 billion in 2015, a decline of more than 40 percent in the last five years. The Urban Institute explains, “Some decline from the ARRA years was to be expected, but it is notable that federal education spending remains 9 percent lower than in pre-recession 2008.”
At the same time, the hope would be that state and local spending on education would have rebounded. Unfortunately, that has not happened. According to analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “In 30 states, total state and local funding combined fell between the 2008 and 2014 school years.”
The fact is that money matters (see here, here, here, and here) and the combined drop in federal, state, and local funding to education has been aShortchanging Our Children, Our Schools, and Our Future – Voices4Kids – Medium:
