Utah is about to experience some serious changes when it comes to education spending. Next year’s budget includes an additional $280 million in funds for school districts. In spite of that, a group called Our Schools Now is trying to create a ballot measure in 2018 that would further increase the education budget by raising the state income tax rate. That sounds great, but you may still be asking, “Where would this money actually go?” and more importantly, “Would this improve our schools?”
Of course, I am not trying to say that it isn’t important to invest in education. I mean, if we didn’t have schools, who would be able to teach our kids such classics as “Hot Cross Buns” on the recorder? No one, that’s who. The recorder is terrible. What I am saying, though, is that we won’t see an improvement in our children’s recorder-playing abilities by pumping more money into an unchecked system.
Come every election cycle, most states have some sort of referendum to increase the amount of money spent on education in the district or state. These referendums (much like the one that Our Schools Now wants to create) pass almost every time, simply because education is one of the few sacred cows of local politics. There’s only one issue: spending doesn’t affect outcomes.
A recent study from the Cato Institute shows that the amount of money spent per student does not play a significant role when it comes to test scores. In fact, since 1970, our country has tripled its per-student spending on education (after accounting for inflation), and there has been essentially no difference in SAT scores from 1970 to now. You’d think that after such a huge investment like that, our kids would at least get better at bubbling things in, but evidently not even that has been the case.
The problem doesn’t lie in how much money we spend, but in how the money is spent. Many people believe that legislators decide where education money goes, but that is only true in the vaguest of terms. In reality, most spending decisions in school districts end up being made by superintendents, and they don’t need to be transparent. To put it this way, here’s where the new money would go: we don't know. Legislators can say what amount of money goes to which subcategory of education, but that can mean essentially anything in the end. For all we know, your superintendent could be planning to use all of that new money on fry sauce if he can explain how it will help the kids. Fry sauce.
So, even though Utah is touted to be dead last when it comes to education spending, the testing results haven’t really reflected that (unless you think that study on Utah driving is a related result). Instead of arguing dollar amounts in education, we should take a look at spending transparency. The new tax probably wouldn’t affect student outcomes; accountability in what we already spend would. That means no more sacred cows. We’re not Chick fil-A, after all.
Dalton Johnson is a member of Divine Comedy, a sketch comedy group at BYU.