Education spending doesn't all go to classrooms

Gov. Bev Perdue has thrown a monkey wrench into state budget deliberations. Perdue announced that she could not support a plan by Democratic legislators to raise taxes by around a billion dollars to close a hole in the current year's budget. Many insiders saw Perdue's statement as disingenuous, considering that her own budget advisers had been involved in the legislators' negotiations.

Another part of Perdue's self-righteous announcement caught my eye. The governor said she would insist that current per-pupil spending on public schools not decline, even one cent. Education is too important ... our children are our future ... yada, yada, yada. Here's the fallacy in that high-principled-sounding defense of education: Per pupil spending includes all of the state's spending on public education, including redundant assistant superintendents for left-brain learners, directors of crayon accounting and under-secretaries of snack machines. Per-pupil spending is a convenient measure of investment in education, but all of that spending doesn't go to the classroom or benefit students. Suppose, for example, the Department of Public Instruction raised all administrative salaries by 100 percent and cut teaching positions by 20 percent. Per-pupil spending might remain the same, but the quality of instruction and the benefit to students would drop precipitously.

Perdue ran on a platform touting her graduate degree and experience in education, but this latest attempt to shore up her political base is transparently phony and won't stand up to the simplest analysis. It also won't do much to improve her statewide approval ratings, which have fallen as drastically as housing prices in south Florida.