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Heritage
Network…
FACT
CHECK: Secretary Arne Duncan on Education
Cuts
By Lindsey Burke
September 10, 2012
During
remarks to attendees in Charlotte last
week, Education Secretary Arne Duncan claimed that the budget passed by
the
House of Representatives would mean “fewer teachers in the classroom,
fewer
resources for poor kids and students with disabilities, [and] fewer
after
school programs.”
However,
the House budget does not designate
specific cuts to K-12 education programs; it simply calls for
reductions in
non-defense discretionary spending over the next decade. Duncan, as he
did in
testimony earlier this year, is using unspecified spending reductions
suggested
in the budget to assume reductions in specific education
programs—something the
budget proposal does not do.
But
even if federal education spending were to
be cut by 20 percent—a goal worth pursuing—would that mean fewer
teachers,
fewer resources for poor and disabled students, and fewer after-school
programs, as Duncan suggests?
Since
the 1970s, federal per-pupil expenditures
have more than doubled (after adjusting for inflation). Those increases
haven’t
all gone to the classroom or toward teacher salaries. Much of that
money has
gone toward expanding bureaucracy and non-teaching administrative
positions in
our nation’s public schools.
From
1970 to 2010, student enrollment increased
a modest 7.8 percent, while the number of non-teaching staff positions
increased 138 percent. But the number of teachers has also been
increasing
steadily over the decades.
In
fact, if preliminary data from the National
Center for Education Statistics is accurate, the student-teacher ratio
in our
nation’s public schools, at 15.2 to 1, will be lower this year than at
any
other point in history. Since 1970, the number of public school
teachers
increased 60 percent, while the number of students increased by only
about 7
percent.
Duncan
also claimed in his remarks that “10
million students could see their Pell Grants reduced, putting higher
education
further out of reach.”
What
has put higher education “further out of
reach” is ever-escalating college costs, which federal subsidies have
exacerbated over the years. The House-approved budget aims to better
target
Pell funding to the low-income students it was originally designed to
help
while limiting the growth of the grants…
Read
the rest of the article at Heritage
Network
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