Psst! School funding involves a lot more than SEEK!

During the Kentucky Tonight show about school choice and HB-563 on March 22, 2020, Jay Brewer, the superintendent of the Dayton Independent School District in Campbell County, messaged show host Renee Shaw that since 2008 funding for the SEEK public school allocation had dropped 12%.

That’s in the ballpark – for this one area of education spending.

But, what Brewer didn’t tell us is that the overall spending for education in Kentucky is up sharply from 2008.

How does that total spending picture for education look? Bluegrass Institute Scholar and UK Professor of Economics Dr. John Garen provides a carefully researched answer that has been corrected for inflation with Figure 1 in his December 2020 report about Facts and Trends Regarding Performance and Funding of K-12 in Kentucky.

In 2008 Dr. Garen reports that total per pupil funding for Kentucky’s schools was $13,300 after correcting for inflation.

In 2019, Dr. Garen found per pupil total spending in the Bluegrass State was $14,115 once inflation was considered.

So, since 2008, the real funding increase in total public school spending in Kentucky – and it was an increase – was $815 per pupil, an rise of about 6%.

But, that doesn’t relate to what you had to put on your 1040 forms for 2008 and 2019 because you paid in non-inflation-corrected dollars.

If we look at the uncorrected spending amounts listed in Dr. Garen’s report, total education spending per pupil went up by about $3,048. Given that there are currently somewhere around 648,000 students in the Kentucky public school system, that is an increase of about $1,975,104,000 more since 2008 that taxpayers have provided.

So, where is all that extra cash going? Apparently not to SEEK. But, that doesn’t mean public education in Kentucky isn’t getting a whole lot more overall from the taxpayer.

Without question, the way this money is getting spent needs to be reexamined. Our old state board of education – the one appointed by former governor Matt Bevin – had started to work on that, forming a finance committee to try and develop better fiscal accounting reports.

But, almost the first act of the new, Beshear-appointed board of education was to kill the finance committee. The new board doesn’t seem interested in tracking down spending so we can find ways to do things better. To be sure, the current school level financial reports being generated under the new board are essentially worthless, too.

All the new board seems interested in is putting their hand out for even more, poorly accounted for tax money. And that, like Mr. Brewer ducking the full financial story, just isn’t right.

Maybe if the current public education system had to face some competition from other school options created by better choices for parents, the system would get its act together and start performing better for our students. Somehow, fretting about SEEK while the taxpayer goes broke paying for other, unknown things in the education system just isn’t working for kids.