Perspective

Sometimes it's worthwhile to just step back and take an outside view. This chart, from the Cato Institute, offers just such a view with respect to education and spending. As you can see, it shows that over the last 30 to 40 years per-student spending has more than doubled in real terms, while students' performance has been flat.

There must be a million possible objections to this, but the prima facie case is awfully compelling: we're not getting our money's worth when it comes to spending on education.

There's a reasonable argument to be made for emphasizing education and even for funding it publicly. But at what point to we start to ask questions such as Have we reached the point of diminishing returns? Can we plausibly argue that the return on the last dollar of education spending is positive?

As I have pointed out before, while this kind of cost/benefit calculation is done routinely in the real world, where non-performance is punished by bankruptcy or unemployment, it seems never to happen in public education. We are asked to take on faith not only that some spending on education produces worthwhile positive externalities, but that every dollar spent on education produces the same return.