Spending More Money Won't Fix Our Schools

From Megan McArdle. Excerpts:

"American spending on education is in line with that of our peers in the developed world -- a little higher than some, a little lower than others, but not really remarkable either way:

That black bar represents total spending, and as you can see, we spend more on education than most of our peers, not less. To be sure, that is partly driven by our very high spending on tertiary education, aka college. But we spend more than most of our peers at most levels, not just on college.

Of course, we're richer than many of our peers, so maybe we should spend more. If you look at spending as a percentage of gross domestic product, we're no longer the highest, we're just average:

We spend more than many of our peers on college and late secondary education, less than a few on primary and early secondary school. Perhaps we should reallocate those resources, diverting more into earlier education. But this is not a problem of inadequate overall investment -- and Japan and Switzerland, which spend less than we do, are hardly Third World hellholes.

What about public investment? Is the problem that we don't put enough public funds into education? I find these sorts of arguments rather unconvincing -- the idea seems to be that we should spend more government money on education not because there's a gap we've identified, but simply for the purpose of spending more government money on education. But at any rate, we spend quite a lot of public funds on education at all levels:

And when you look at primary, secondary and post-secondary training, we're on par:

You can argue that there's an inequality problem in our schools. In fact, I think there is obviously an inequality problem in our schools, but that the big problem is not at the college level, but rather in the primary and secondary schools that are overwhelmingly government-funded. And those disparities are also not primarily about the dollar amounts going into schools -- Detroit spends well above the U.S. average per pupil, and yet one study found that half the population of the city was "functionally illiterate."

"It is just as likely that improvements will come from changing methods and reallocating resources as that they will require us to pour more money into failing institutions."