What do we know about public education? I dont know.

This past weekend was the Texas GOP Convention.  Full of campaign rhetoric, and events from politicians from all over the state and nation from people like Ted Cruz, David Dewhurst and even Paul Ryan, the convention was not without drama.  While Ted Cruz seemed to own the crowd with overwhelming tea-party support, David Dewhurst, known as the establishment candidate, was actually booed when he attempted to paint his opponent as a Chinese supporting traitor.  Ted Cruz and Dewhurst are in a runoff for the senate seat formerly held by Kay Bailey Hutchinson.  This event happened on the heels of one of the biggest statement elections of the year, the Wisconsin Recall elections of Scott Walker(Governor of Wisconsin) and his supporting cast.  Walker and every one of the state legislators won their recall election in a huge landslide victory.  The victory marking a strong message to unions AND the education system across America.

These all were huge events of the past week, but, what I want to talk about is the education system in question in Wisconsin and Texas.  As most know, the Wisconsin recall event was in response to Walker's large budget cuts to state-funded teacher unions in the state of Wisconsin.  These teacher unions were asked to contribute more to their own pension funds by these cuts.  They were asked to contribute to their own insurance.  Now, the argument is that Scott Walker could have made cuts elsewhere besides public school funding, but is that true?  Let's take a look how school districts actually budget.  Well, that is actually tough to find.  When looking at local budgets it is tough to find any transparency on what schools actually spend their money on.  However, state and federal government funding is available.  State and government funding for public education has increased nationwide over the past decade with much of it coming through federal stimulus packages.  the stimulus packages were to be used to encourage reform in education but instead were used to prevent layoffs.  Given the current state of the economy, this is understandable.  Or does it speak to the underlying problem of the economy?  

Texas education funding, like Wisconsin, was also cut in the last legislative session.  According to politifact.com per-student spending was decreased by an average of  $500 per student in Texas.  This number was down from almost $8000 to just above $7000 a year per student.  This decrease in state funding must be due to the trend in the last decade for increased spending by individual school districts in Texas!  The graph below shows this trend.






  

In this graph we can see that education expenditures have greatly exceeded enrollment in the last decade by almost 5 to 1 according to this website http://fastexas.org/study/exec/spending.php

This trend begs the question:  Is another student in the classroom really five times more expensive than the previous amount?  Are the increasing marginal costs really that steep?

I only ask this question in response:  Every year, students in elementary school are required to bring new supplies to be shared by everybody in the class.  My question, what happens to all the scissors every year?