“…Over 30 years, federal spending on education has grown by 375 percent, but test scores remain flat.”
— Dave Brat on Monday, February 16th, 2015 in a Facebook post.
U.S. Rep. Dave Brat wants to rein in federal funding for public education.
A Virginia Republican, Brat backs the Student Success Act, a GOP bill that would scale back Uncle Sam’s role in overseeing public schools and consolidate dozens of federal education programs.
On Feb. 11, the former college professor introduced a successful amendment in the House Education and Workforce Committee that would require the U.S. Department of Education to issue annual reports recommending ways to save on school spending.
Five days later, Brat took to Facebook and posted his view in modern terms. “Our own government statistics show that over 30 years, federal spending on education has grown by 375%, but test scores have remained flat,” he wrote. “That proves that just throwing more money at education is not the solution.”
We wondered whether Brat’s post is accurate.
Brian Gottstein, a spokesman for Bratt, said the congressman’s statement was based on July 2012 testimony by Neal McCluskey before a U.S. Senate education subcommittee. McCluskey, is director of the Center for Educational Freedom at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. He said that federal education cuts mandated under sequestration — Congress’s 2011 agreement to chop domestic and defense spending in return for raising the nation’s borrowing limit — “are both necessary and overdue.”
A reading of McCluskey’s testimony instantly turns up an inaccuracy in Brat’s statement. McCluskey said the 375 percent increase, adjusted for inflation, occurred over a 40-year period from 1970 to 2010. Brat posted that the increase occurred over 30 years and didn’t offer dates.
McCluskey cited White House figures showing federal outlays for elementary, secondary and vocational education were $2.9 billion in 1970 and rose to $73.3 billion in 2010. When adjusted for inflation, that comes to about a 375 percent increase.
But there’s an issue with using 2010 as the end date for measuring the growth. U.S. education spending hit a record high in 2010, bolstered by more than $30 billion in special stimulus money Washington sent states in the wake of the Great Recession to help pay for schools.
The stimulus program has stopped and during the last budget year the U.S. spent $40.8 billion on education. Going back 30 years, as Brat did, puts us in 1984 when federal spending on schools was $6.5 billion. Adjusted for inflation, that’s a 176 percent increase.
Now, let’s throw in another factor: the number of students in publicly-funded schools across the nation increased from 39.2 million in 1984 to a projected 50 million in 2014. Federal spending per student rose from $165 in 1984 to about $816 in 2014. Adjusted for inflation, that’s a 117 percent increase — less than one-third of Brat’s figure.
We should note that when we queried Brat’s office about the Feb. 16 Facebook post, spokesman Gottstein sent us a Feb. 11 news release in which the congressmen correctly said that the 375 increase in education spending took place over 40 years — from 1970 to 2010. The public, however, doesn’t have access to this detail.
Let’s look at the second part of Brat’s statement.
Brat’s claim that test scores “have been flat” again comes from McCluskey’s 2012 Senate testimony. McCluskey said that between 1970 and 2010, math and reading scores on National Assessment of Educational Progress tests, “have been almost stagnant for 17-year-olds, the final product of our elementary and secondary system.”
The NAEP, frequently called “The Nation’s Report Card,” refers to a variety of tests given every four years to fourth, eighth and twelfth graders in a sampling of states. McCluskey focused on the “long-term trend” test for 17-year-olds, which since the early 1970s has measured achievement on an unchanged set of math and reading skills.
Brat is hardly the first to call the results for 17-year-olds “flat.” Education Week, a nationally-circulated periodical, used the same term in a 2009 headline to describe the history of NAEP scores for the age group. The chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee that year — Rep. George Miller, D-Calif. — called it “deeply troubling” that high schoolers were not making “meaningful gains” on the tests. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in 2014 that NAEP results underscore a need to “reject educational stagnation in our high schools.”
Many educators say the focus on average test results for all 17-year-olds overlooks significant gains by other groups and subgroups taking the NAEP.
Our ruling
Brat says that “over 30 years, federal spending on education has grown by 375 percent, but test scores remain flat.”
The inflation-adjusted figure Brat uses to describe what he sees as runaway federal spending on education over 30 years is overblown. You can only get near a 375 percent increase if you start in 1970 and end in 2010, when U.S. school funding was nearly doubled with stimulus money and stood at an all-time high of $73.3 billion.
Uncle Sam spent $40.8 billion on public schools last year. When you divide that by enrollment, it comes to $816 a student. Adjusted for inflation, that’s a 117 percent increase in federal spending per student over 30 years ago.
That said, the increase in per-student spending is still significant and Brat has valid point on the test results. Average NAEP scores for 17-year-olds have barely budged during the last 30 years of testing.
We rate the totality of Brat’s statement Mostly True.
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