Except for tiny Luxembourg, the United States spends more money on education than every other OECD country and exceeds the OECD average by over 50 percent. This is not just true of absolute levels of expenditures: As a share of GDP, combining federal, state and local expenditures, the US also spends more on education than its peers. In 2021, the US spent about 5.6 percent of GDP on education, compared to the OECD average of 5 percent, 4.5 percent in Germany, 3.5 percent in Japan, and 5.2 percent in France. Over the past two decades, this continual increase in spending outpaced the growth in the student population, such that per-pupil expenditures on education grew from $16,600 in 2003 to close to $20,000 in 2022 (in constant 2022 dollars). But even as more money gets poured into our education system, student performance has not improved.

Student scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) peaked years ago and have declined over the last decade. Our students have also not improved on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which tests 15-year-old students across the globe. In 2000, the first year of PISA, US students scored 504 in reading and 482 in math (PISA was designed to make the average score 500 points, with a 100-point standard deviation). In 2022, the most recent PISA test administration, the US scored 504 in reading—the same as 2000. And math? Just 465.

Even though the nation already spends more than its peers on education—and has not seen commensurately high performance on student achievement—in the last few years, the amount of money flowing into schools grew dramatically. Most notably, over three years during COVID, the federal government funded the newly created Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) Fund to the tune of $190 billion. This was the largest-ever flood of federal money into public education.

In the few years since ESSER was passed, the data show that, in general, school districts spent money on the same items they did before the pandemic influx. But we are mostly flying blind, without enough information about where the money went and whether it bought any improvements.

In 2015, the federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) mandated better information and increased transparency about school expenditures. Despite this long-standing legal mandate, the federal government—specifically, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES)—has failed in its responsibility to gather and publicize the data needed to track school expenditures in a timely manner. In October 2023, NCES issued a report (not raw data, mind you, just a report) on revenues and expenditures for Fiscal Year 2021. The full data have been promised for some time but not released—and as of today, the most up-to-date school finance data are from 2017.

This hole has been largely filled by Marguerite Roza of Georgetown’s Edunomics Laboratory. But despite Roza’s excellent work, more detailed analysis needs to be done to unpack national trends and extract lessons that can help us understand how to reverse the stagnation evident nationally—and to make the large and ever-growing national investment in education more effective and efficient.

The combination of increasing expenditures, a continued lack of transparency, and a lack of timeliness on the part of the federal education statistical agency seems to meet Einstein’s definition that “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

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