Red State Education, Blue State Education

"Public education" increasingly means different things in different states

Last fall, I wrote a piece for The 74 Million titled, “The 50 Very Different States of American Public Education.” In that piece, I chronicled how public education looks very different depending on where you happen to live. From spending and staffing levels to the types of teachers they employ, what might look weird to a New Yorker is now common in Florida, and vice versa.

For example, schools in New York and Washington, D.C. now spend about three times what schools in Utah and Idaho spend. These figures are not adjusted for cost-of-living differences, but they are operating very different schools. A typical school in New York pays its staff a lot higher salaries and can still afford to employ almost twice the number of people (per student) than a school in Utah or Arizona can.

There are similarly large differences when it comes to who those employees are. Do teachers have to go through traditional, university-based preparation programs, or are they coming from alternative routes? Do most teachers have Master’s degrees or not? These answers vary tremendously across the states. For instance, only about one-third of public school teachers in Oklahoma have a Master’s degree, compared to nearly all of them in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York.

I find these differences interesting, but I also wanted to know whether the states are becoming more or less similar over time. That is, are these gaps relatively static, or do we see an increasing divergence across the country?

I started by taking a simple look at per-pupil spending levels. The chart below uses box plots to show inflation-adjusted, per-pupil spending levels over time. A box plot plot is useful to see the spread and skewness of data over time. In the graph, you can quickly spot two big trends:

1. Spending has risen significantly over time, across the board, and;

2. The states are pulling away from each other, and they now look more different on education spending than they used to.

Source: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d23/tables/dt23_208.40.asp

The main driver across this 50-year period is that all states have increased their spending on education.

There has been some movement in the per-pupil spending rankings. For example, Nevada’s was 24th in 1970, but by 2020 it had fallen down to 47th. On the other end, Kentucky has shot up the rankings, from 49th in 1970 to 28th in 2020, and Vermont went from 21st in 1970 to 3rd in 2020.

But there’s also no signs of a large-scale convergence. The correlation between a state’s ranking in 1970 and 2020 was .75. That’s reasonably high, and it means the bottom is not catching up to the top. If anything, the highest-spending states have pulled away from the median and lower-spending states. New York, for example, was #1 in 1970 and remained #1 in 2020. D.C. was #3 in 1970 and rose to #2 in 2020. New Jersey was #4 in 1970 and #4 in 2020. Connecticut was #5 in 1970 and still #5 in 2020.

You can see a similar divergence in staffing ratios, where the states with the lowest staffing ratios have continued to add more staff while states with the highest ratios have not.

So what? Does this matter?

These rankings matter in the political realm, where advocacy groups and politicians seem to like using their state’s ranking to argue for more spending. And money does matter, even it’s not clear that these rankings are anything other than symbolic.

It’s also the case that some states seem to get better student outcomes with their education investments. For example, Massachusetts is a relatively high spending state, and its students perform the best on the Urban Institute’s adjusted NAEP scores for 8th grade math. But North Carolina comes in third in student outcomes, despite falling near the bottom on spending.

Sources: Adjusted NAEP ranking courtesy of Urban Institute data for 8th grade math, spending data via NCES.

What to make of all this? Partly it’s just interesting stuff, but I do think it’s relevant that our country’s education systems are diverging more and more over time. A few important takeaways:

1. Be careful not to “nationalize” education stories. What Florida or Texas or Arizona are doing is just not that relevant to what’s going on in New York or North Dakota.

2. The "laboratories of democracy” idea is pretty important here. Even if we’re hesitant to try out an idea ourselves, we could all stand to learn more about what our neighbors are doing.

3. Inertia matters a lot. Unless a state gets a large financial windfall (like striking oil), or has some other long-term investment plan (which would require an inordinately strong bipartisan consensus), it’s likely going to look pretty similar over time. Advocates can’t swim upstream forever, and fundamental factors like a state’s economy and its politics are likely going to be pretty similar over time.

4. Money does matter, but lower-spending states can still have strong education systems. Lower-spending states like North Carolina, Florida, Texas, and Georgia all produce strong education outcomes for kids.