Budgets were ballooning but not being spent on hiring more teachers to teach. Class sizes are huge.
Bottom half of households wage is stagnant over past 50 years.
In nearly all districts funding is allocated on a per student formula equally to schools.
> Budgets were ballooning but not being spent on hiring more teachers to teach. Class sizes are huge.
K-12 pupil teacher ratios have shrunk dramatically: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d09/tables/dt09_064.asp
In the 1970s, there were over 20 students per teacher in public schools. Today it’s under 15.
> Bottom half of households wage is stagnant over past 50 years.
Not true but I don’t want to get side-tracked on a separate issue, since we are talking about supposed “cuts” in public services. What got cut?
1) Excluding federal funding (which is directed to poor school districts) 20 states provide meaningfully more per-student funding (> 5% difference) to poor districts. In 6 states, poor school districts get 15% more funding than rich ones. Only 4 states provide meaningfully less per-student funding (> 5% difference) to poor school districts versus rich ones: https://www.usnews.com/dims4/USNEWS/39d5daf/2147483647/resiz....
2) More generally, per-student spending, adjusted for inflation, has more than tripled since 1960: https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/blog_.... Aside from a very small dip in 2008-2010, spending has been monotonically increasing for the last 60 years.
3) In the United States, nearly everyone, about 95% of students, attends our well-funded public schools: http://www.oecd.org/education/EAG2014-Indicator%20C7%20(eng).... The OECD average is closer to 80%.
4) Public social welfare spending, as a share of the economy, has consistently increased over the last 50 years, except for a brief dip after the 2008 recession: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long.... In 1990, we spent about 13% of the economy on social welfare. Today, it's over 19%.
So please explain to me, what "got cut?" There is so much talk about "austerity" and America being "hollowed out" but it's not reflected anywhere in the numbers. If I were being cynical, I would say that people are gas-lighting the public to deflect attention away from the fact that the Great Society project didn't work. (Or at least insofar as it did work, some other aspect of society is crumbling faster than the government can increase spending to remedy the effects.)