Education & Despotism
Democrat Minnesota Governor Tim Walz claims that Republicans “hate public education because it’s easier to run an authoritarian government if you don’t have a population that knows.”
IN FACT, authoritarian regimes have routinely used public education to repress their people, including Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and Communist China — which Walz praised and where he took his students for trips.
Republicans have repeatedly called for the improvement of public education, and the facts show there’s a lot of room for improvement:
- Only 37% of U.S. residents aged 16 and older can correctly answer a question that requires basic logic, addition, and division.
- Only 20% of college-bound high school students who take the ACT exam meet its college readiness benchmarks in all four subjects (English, reading, math, and science).
- 15-year-old U.S. students rank 31st among 37 developed nations in math, even though the U.S. spends an average of 31% more per K-12 student than other developed nations.
- Two-thirds to three-quarters of all young adults in the U.S. are unqualified for military service because of poor physical fitness, weak educational skills, illegal drug use, medical conditions, or criminal records.
Public schools cannot be logically blamed for the entirety of this situation because many other factors are involved. However, public schools play a major role in all of these outcomes.
Democrats commonly blame the problems of public education on a lack of funding, but the facts show that:
- inflation-adjusted spending per public school student has risen by 31% since 2000, 111% since 1980, 4 times since 1960, 25 times since 1920, and 41 times since 1885.
- public schools spend an average of $376,003 per classroom per year.
- inflation-adjusted government spending on higher education has risen from $4,308 per student in 1959 to $13,237 in 2023, or by 3 times.
