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While there may be an effort to defund public schools, funding (inflation adjusted) has been increasing. https://www.statista.com/statistics/203118/expenditure

• chii 3y ago
  Between 2008 and 2018, there's a drop, then recovery, of school funding (back to 2008 levels). That's a decade. I think this underfunding during that period may have contributed a lot to the current state.
• ianbicking 3y ago
  To me it feels like the duties of schools have been expanded more than their funding has been decreased. Demands and duties around special needs students have gone way up, with a much wider set of students being identified as special needs in some fashion, and more expensive interventions. And there's expectations that the school should address other social needs the children might encounter. So there's lots of programs and interventions and support systems, and the bureaucracy to manage that... and maybe those things work and maybe they don't, but even ineffective programs cost money. I also think schools would be a classic case where Baumol's Cost Disease would make the cost go up relative to other parts of the economy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect) And really if you go to schools today it's clear they are more well funded than 30-40 years ago. Teaching was hardly well paid at that time either. But society demands modernity and modernity is expensive.