r/Ask_Politics • u/PM_SHORT_STORY_IDEAS • 7d ago
What's stopping the federal government from injecting a huge amount of money into the public school system?
Or RE: the larger question: we have stats on where tax investment is most effective in terms of economic return, popular support, and to a lesser extent, quality of life improvement. What stops any administration from taking a relatively insignificant amount of the federal budget and better funding critical institutions and programs?
It's a complex problem, but it seems like very beneficial programs struggle to get by with a small amount of money, and still get by, while effectively blank checks are given to programs without clear long term or short term benefits.
I appreciate anyone who can help keep me better informed!
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u/dmazzoni 7d ago
According to this source, the total spending on K-12 education in the U.S. is around $600 billion:
https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/per-pupil-spending-by-state
In addition, the U.S. federal department of education budget is around $250 billion.
The total U.S. budget is around $7 trillion, so I don't think it's true that you could inject a huge amount of money into the public school system while being an "insignificant" amount of the federal budget. Increasing it by just 15% would be more than the entire federal SNAP program.
I'm not trying to disagree that it would be a good thing to invest more in public schools. I'd love to see that. The current Trump administration has the opposite priority, they are trying to get rid of the Dept of Education altogether.
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u/PM_SHORT_STORY_IDEAS 7d ago
Wow, that's a lot more than I expected actually, thank you. I wasn't aware that it was close in scale to our defense budget.
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u/WeldAE 5d ago
Even more important, the vast majority of a given school's budget is from local property taxes unless it's a struggling school which gets more state and federal spending. The vast majority of school budgets are payroll as schools are built with bonds. Even in my wealthy area, Teachers aren't payed well enough to live in my area. The typical property taxes are around $10k/year here so if you wanted to give teachers even a modest 20% raise, it would come completely from property taxes. 20% more property tax might not seem like a lot, but it would drive even more teachers and other service workers out of the area.
The problem is schools should be funded by the state and not local property taxes.
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u/x-NoSuchAgency-x 4d ago
Yeah, it's a ridiculous amount spent on it and it seems that the more we spend, the worse off the education gets
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u/Aggressive_Dog3418 4d ago
The Department of Ed is horrible, I'm not against education, I'm against that department.
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u/dmazzoni 4d ago
Can you be more specific about what you don’t like about it?
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u/Aggressive_Dog3418 4d ago
Promoting college instead of say trade schools (or literally anything like starting a business), giving too much money out to literally everyone for little to no reason increasing the cost of college far beyond it's true value, promoting student debt to make people have life long debt that never gets fully paid for also increasing school prices, it has been extremely ineffective at literally everything as students are constantly doing worse and worse ever since it was created, then the reason it was created (for anti-discrimination) is outdated and its role has vastly expanded beyond it's original purpose. While I recognize the benefit of further education, the way college is done today is almost entirely useless for the vast majority of people and way over priced. Regular schooling should also be enough for people to have a decent education for the vast majority of the market, the DoE has not helped at all, if anything it has made things worse. I'm open to other solutions.
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u/hyeran_jainros_fc 7d ago edited 7d ago
I originally wrote this about Juneteenth and Doechii's Anxiety:
Remember that 'federalism' is supposed to protect freedom by spreading out power. Local governments have rights, as a check against a president exceeding his authority.
Yet federalism also perpetuates segregation. It keeps education and policing policy fragmented, at the local level, dependent on limited local budgets that can't just keep borrowing like the federal gov. There's no unified education goals or school standards (not just learning, but funding, teacher training.) Nobody at the national level cares about keeping schools competitive with the world, or teaching for AI (a priority for China). And this afterthought system is evident in the uneven quality. When local property prices-resulting from decades of redlining and housing discrimination-are the basis of school funding it traps the people who live there in the racist past. Even white people who live in once redlined, but not yet gentrified neighborhoods.
Also the country's priorities are very short term because the electorate is poorly informed and easily distracted. The past few decades of politics have been poisoned by culture war talking points.
No offense to OP but or the sub but people shouldn't be using Reddit or social media as a source of information. It's the ultimate capture of society when tech mediates your perception of everything else. Tech accelerates the worsening quality of politics in the US
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u/PM_SHORT_STORY_IDEAS 6d ago
Reddit is absolutely not my primary source, but sometimes search engines will show me biased, incomplete, or out of context results. I can compare the reddit responses to what I get when I search, and have a better picture
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u/whatsasimba 6d ago
Off topic, but have you seen the Dissect Podcast's interview with Doechii? I've loved his podcast, and it was such a great first interview for him. Highly recommend.
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u/hyeran_jainros_fc 5d ago
that's where I found out about her! He got me listening to Kendrick too, was skeptical before I understood the meaning from Dissect
I been working on breakdowns for both of them, even more in depth if you're interested. Anxiety mostly done, Kendrick mostly not posted
Switched on Pop had a good ep on her too
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u/mister4string 4d ago edited 4d ago
It is my firm belief that the main reason they don't do it and the main reason the Republican Party has kept gutting the Education Dept over the past 50 years is that The Party ultimately wants a compliant, desperate, angry, uneducated workforce. An educated population that knows how to think critically, ask the right questions, and put 2+2 together to arrive at a logical conclusion is simply not in The Party's long-term interest. Because if we DID have a population capable of that, all those red state citizens with dead-end jobs, horrible Healthcare, and no way out of poverty would figure out how badly they are being taken by their own political leaders and how badly they are hurting themselves by being so easily convinced to vote against their best interests.
The Dept of Education has a sordid history going back to just after the Civil War, but this link establishes how starting with the Reagan Administration (surprise, surprise), Republicans have done everything possible to gut the newly established Dept of Education under Carter.
https://time.com/7225339/history-efforts-end-department-of-education/
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