The Florida Teachers Union argues that adding tax dollars to pay teachers and administrators will improve students’ standardized test scores.
But Open the Books (OTB) surveyed 12,531 school districts nationwide and found the opposite. In other words, spending more money did not improve student performance.
OTB looked at its proprietary database of government payrolls across the United States to calculate how much each U.S. state increased total public school salaries. They measured math and reading proficiency among fourth- and eighth-graders and compared each state’s ranking on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).
“Schools may hope that increasing salaries will help students outperform other states, but there is little data evidence to support that claim,” OTB said.
The worst-performing states were California and New York, where scores continued to decline despite increases in administrative staff and salaries.
Christian Barnard, assistant director for education reform at the Reason Foundation, looked at per-student spending in the United States and found that spending increased by about 21% from 2002 to 2019, but 64% of that increase went to paying benefits to instructional and support staff. Barnard said that if benefits had continued to track inflation, U.S. schools could have saved nearly $70 billion in 2019, enough to give every teacher in the U.S. a $20,913 raise.
In Florida, Miami-Dade County Public Schools had the second-best test scores in 2024, but its per-student labor costs were just $6,380, the fifth-lowest among the 25 largest cities, OTB reported. Hillsborough County spent just $5,330 on staff costs per student, second lowest among large cities. Students’ test scores were ranked 5th.
Another area where less money is being spent on classrooms is through school pension funding. OTB points out that school districts spend more money servicing pension debt than students. In 2019, school districts across the country spent $4.36 billion on pensions, but that number jumped to $5.02 billion in 2023.
