Money Matters - No Matter What Trump Says
And a note about shutting down the Dept. of Education
Chief Oligarch Elon Musk and the president he purchased are fans of ending the Department of Education and sending some money back to the states. They also suggest that when it comes to public education, money doesn’t really matter - that we spend too much and aren’t seeing results.
However, the public education advocacy group Public Funds for Public Schools made clear in congressional hearings this week that money does matter. A lot.
Let’s just repeat for the 1000th time, with a go-to reference if you need it: research is “essentially settled” on this question: more money improves both short-run and long-run student and community outcomes.
By the way—and as Bob pointed out—that’s even true for COVID recovery (ESSER) funding: the money did help students recover, but not enough to bring students back academically from a once-in-a-century pandemic. One way to think of this is that public school spending is absolutely necessary for educational improvement. It’s just not always sufficient to overcome poverty, pandemics, or historical economic neglect. And adequate funding is always better than not enough.
One thing the Musk administration has talked about is shifting some of the Department of Education’s responsibilities to other parts of the federal government.
The now infamous Project 2025 urged a future President Trump to return federal funding streams to states in “block grants” (which operate like vouchers), though any plans for disbursement at the state level remain unclear. Experts predict these funds will be subject to being “voucherized,” or being diverted to private schools and homeschool. As SOSAZ Director Beth Lewis states, “If federal dollars were sent to the states, and that funding were reallocated to private school vouchers for example, our public schools would shut down.” This, of course, is the entire point as the special interests behind Project 2025 aim to privatize public education.
And Public Funds for Public Schools has some handy tools to help you analyze the potential impact of federal education funding cuts on your state:
One way to do that is with an important new resource from the University of Michigan’s Ford School of Public Policy, which allows you to calculate federal education spending by congressional district. And as I mentioned previously, check out Education Law Center’s new advocacy tool, Trump 2.0: How Much Federal Education Aid Could Your State Lose?
And yes, MONEY MATTERS:
One district in Oregon moved starting pay from $38,000 to $60,000 and adjusted the top of the scale (from $72,000 to $86,000) - here’s what happened next:
In recent years, we generally would be lucky to have a single applicant for a position, fully qualified or otherwise. After announcing the salary schedule change, we had pools of qualified applicants to consider. It was a fun spring. Our administrators were having to have these rich conversations about best fit, really digging into things like, ‘Here’s a full table of highly qualified people; who is going to best fulfill the needs of our school? It’s a conversation that most districts don’t get to have right now.
Teacher pay matters. Investing in the people who have direct contact with students is a direct investment in student success.
When teachers get paid more, students do better. In one study, a 10% increase in teacher pay was estimated to produce a 5 to 10% increase in student performance. Teacher pay also has long-term benefits for students. A 10% increase in per-pupil spending for each of the 12 years of education results in students completing more education, having 7% higher wages, and having a reduced rate of adult poverty. These benefits are even greater for families who are in poverty.
So, despite what Musk, Trump, and their GOP allies claim, money matters. To schools, to students, to teachers.
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One more note (from Education Law Center) on the imminent Executive Order to dismantle the Department of Education - what Ed Secretary Linda McMahon describes as the Dept’s “Final Mission”:
The only thing the Trump administration would be “returning” us to is a time throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries when the federal government didn’t provide coordinated aid or support, when many students were left out of public education altogether, when higher education was out of reach for all but a few, and when states and districts – no matter how cash-strapped, no matter how uneven their commitment to embracing integration and equal access for all students – were left to their own devices.
The move to eliminate the Department is astonishingly retrograde, taking us back generations, instead of positioning us for success as a nation in the 21st century, when a vibrant education system matters more than ever for our economy, our national security, our democracy, and to foster the well-being and bright futures of millions of children.