COMMENTARY: School spending can never be high enough to satisfy Big Labor

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the primary statistical agency of the Department of Education, the number of taxpayer-funded employees on the payrolls of government K-12 schools increased more than 614,000 from 2012 to 2022, the most recent year for which such data is available. Over that decade, NCES data shows the number of children enrolled in government K-12 schools nationwide fell by nearly 153,000.

The number of people on government K-12 payrolls is swelling even in the states with the greatest enrollment declines, which are typically also the states where union officials wield the most clout.

In Big Labor-dominated California, for example, where 54 percent of civil servants are unionized, compared with 36 percent nationwide, government K-12 payrolls surged by 71,000 between 2012 and 2022, even as enrollment fell by 369,000.

In union-friendly New York, where 67 percent of public employees are unionized, taxpayer-funded school staff grew by 61,000, while student enrollment dropped by 178,000.

Not surprisingly, the cost to taxpayers for government schools has increased steeply in conjunction with this staffing surge. From 2012 to 2022, Census Bureau data shows per-pupil public expenditures for elementary and secondary school systems skyrocketed by 47 percent.

By any reasonable standard, the nearly $1 trillion in federal, state and local taxpayer money the United States now forks over yearly to school fewer public K-12 students than it did a decade ago constitutes a huge and rapidly growing investment, on which it is getting a return that is mediocre at best.

Unfortunately, regarding government spending in recent years, a vast number of elected officials and political operatives nationwide have adopted an unreasonable way of thinking. It was expressed succinctly in February in a paper by Heidi Shierholz and left-leaning academic Josh Bivens for the Economic Policy Institute.

According to Shierholz and Bivens, state and local governments, whose collective spending soared by 62 percent from 2015 to 2025 (26 percentage points above CPI inflation for the decade!), to reach nearly $4.4 trillion annually, are being “starved”!

They reach this outlandish conclusion by making implicit assumptions they couldn’t possibly defend if they were made explicit.

For example, nationwide enrollment in K-12 government schools is declining, and in some states it is falling substantially. This is happening in part because U.S. birth rates have been declining for nearly two decades, but primarily because more and more parents, having lost all confidence in Big Labor-dominated government education, are now opting to homeschool their children or send them to private schools.

When enrollments decline but inflation-adjusted government school budgets do not, real per-pupil spending increases. According to the EPI writers’ loopy logic, spending doesn’t increase because they assume government school spending should increase at least as much as the overall economy does, even if enrollments are falling!

This and other topics espoused by the EPI would not matter much were it not for its use of such fallacious arguments to promote the adoption and retention of special-interest laws that empower government union bosses, who are not accountable to the public, to co-determine with elected officials and their appointees how civil servants are compensated and managed.

In Virginia this year, for example, union lobbyists are eagerly citing the “findings” of EPI to justify their quest to secure the enactment of a state law mandating union-monopoly bargaining over the compensation and work rules of 500,000 front-line state and local civil servants.

Effectively, the EPI case for mandatory union-monopoly bargaining in Virginia is that government spending and taxes in the commonwealth are far too low, and additional legal privileges for public-sector unions are needed to help push them ever higher.

If a mandatory monopoly-bargaining bill reaches the governor’s desk, as seems likely, she should carefully consider whether the EPI goal is her goal.

Stan Greer is a senior research associate with the National Institute for Labor Relations Research. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.