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Just the facts, please…

By Richard G. Innes

Do Kentucky taxpayers spend enough on public schools? Not according to an obscure magazine.

A recent report by Governing magazine ranks Kentuckians as the nation’s worst when it comes to the amount of money they spend per capita and as a proportion of their personal income to support the commonwealth’s public education system.

Groups and individuals pushing for a dramatic increase in education spending during the 2006 General Assembly session gleefully use the report’s claims to insinuate that Kentucky’s lawmakers and taxpayers are cheapskates.

However, the magazine’s claim is inaccurate. It uses numbers extracted from the wrong set of school-funding data on the U.S. Census Bureau’s gargantuan Web site. We wonder if the magazine’s researchers who made this mistake appreciate the huge can of worms they opened.

The magazine has never publicly acknowledged that the report is based on the wrong set of numbers and thus fallacious – even though its information finds no agreement with other credible sources.

According to Census experts, the particular Web file Governing magazine used to make its inaccurate claims counts only funds spent at the school-district level in each state. This file does not indicate that some states like Kentucky do not transmit funding for expensive teacher-retirement and health-care programs through local school districts.

The particular Census file used by Governing magazine’s researchers makes it appear that Kentuckians spend much less on public education because these high-cost benefits are funded at the state level instead of being funneled through local school districts. By using such uneven data, Governing magazine creates enormous confusion about how much Kentuckians do – or don’t – support their schools.

None of the Census Bureau’s carefully developed comparisons rank Kentucky 50th in any category involving the financing of public education. In fact, the bureau’s document titled “Public Education Finances 2003” ranks Kentucky 24th in the nation regarding the fiscal support provided to its schools from state-level sources.

When adjusting that funding – comprised primarily of the SEEK money controlled by the legislature – to reflect the state’s personal-income level, the Census ranks Kentucky taxpayers 16th-best in the nation for public-education spending.

Another credible source of spending on public schools is the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), which shows that even early in this decade, Kentucky was increasing its funding of public schools when compared with other states.

In its recent “Digest of Education Statistics, 2004,” the NCES lists per-pupil funding information for the 2001-02 school year (the same year Governing magazine uses to make its claims). A ranking using these NCES figures reveals that Kentucky was 38th – not 50th – for total education spending in the nation.

A ranking of the same information from the center’s “Digest for Education Statistics, 2003” revealed that Kentucky improved its ranking by two full places between the 2000-01 and 2001-02 school years.

Even the National Education Association (NEA), which naturally would be expected to lobby for increased education spending, sharply disagrees with Governing magazine’s statistics. A recent NEA report shows Kentucky actually increased its total per-pupil spending on education for the 2004-05 school year and now ranks 29th in the nation – up from 30th during the previous year.

It is difficult to understand why education activists so ardently pound the education table with these nonsensical claims when they know that Kentuckians’ personal incomes rank in the bottom 20 percent in the nation. Certainly they don’t expect low-income parents to shell out even more? Or do they?

Even when appraised of the fact that Governing magazine used the wrong file when making their comparisons, some agenda pushers – among them a state representative from Northern Kentucky, the executive director of a well-known state education advocacy group and a Covington school-board member – have continued to repeat the 50th-place nonsense. Using erroneous data to justify a preconceived conclusion is a dangerous proposition for these leaders.

An anonymous sage once offered good advice for those who used faulty information in an attempt to obscure Kentuckians’ true spending on education: “Mistakes are a great educator when one is honest enough to admit them and willing to learn from them.”

– Richard G. Innes is an education analyst for the Bluegrass Institute, Kentucky’s free-market think tank. An edited version of this article appeared in the Kentucky Post on Jan. 11 and the Jan. 19 edition of The Cincinnati Enquirer.

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