{"id":450,"date":"2026-06-13T06:11:05","date_gmt":"2026-06-13T06:11:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nationallogisticspost.com\/?p=450"},"modified":"2026-06-13T06:11:05","modified_gmt":"2026-06-13T06:11:05","slug":"more-money-wont-fix-our-schools-our-data-proves-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nationallogisticspost.com\/?p=450","title":{"rendered":"More Money Won\u2019t Fix Our Schools. Our Data Proves It"},"content":{"rendered":"
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F<\/span>or decades, America has been told that the key to better schools is more money. Underperformance, the argument runs, is really a question of resources. Just give the teacher unions what they ask for, and good outcomes will follow.<\/p>\n

Read more Even Mamdani\u2019s New \u2018Transgender\u2019 Clinic Won\u2019t Treat Kids<\/a><\/p>\n

Mississippi is starting to show that this simply is not true.<\/p>\n

Over the past decade, Mississippi has made such progress in fourth-grade reading that people have taken to calling it the \u201cMississippi miracle.\u201d Mississippi ranked 9th in the country for fourth-grade reading in 2024, up from 49th in 2013 \u2014 a 40-place climb in a decade, from near the bottom of the table into the top ten.<\/p>\n

Mississippi\u2019s fourth graders now read better than their peers in New York, Minnesota, and California \u2014 every one of them a state that spends a great deal more per child than we do. And here is the part the spend-more crowd would rather you did not dwell on. We get those better results for far less money.<\/p>\n

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The higher the per-pupil spending, the worse the grades.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

Mississippi spends around $12,300 per pupil, one of the five lowest figures in America. New York spends $31,918 \u2014 more than two and a half times as much \u2014 and its children read less well for it. New York, in other words, buys more than two dollars of schooling for every one of ours, and ends up further behind.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the starkest comparison of all is with California. A Black fourth grader in Mississippi is now somewhere between two and a half and three times more likely to read at grade level than a Black fourth grader in California \u2014 19 percent reach proficiency here, against just 7 percent there \u2014 and California spends well over half as much again per pupil as we do. If money were the answer, those numbers would be the other way round.\u00a0(RELATED: May Day or Mayday in Chicago?)<\/strong><\/p>\n

There is no reliable relationship between what a school spends and what its children actually learn. Mississippi proves this point not only when you compare our results to other states, but when you examine what is happening inside Mississippi in granular detail.<\/p>\n

Here at the Mississippi Center for Public Policy, we built a free online tool \u2014\u00a0CompareMySchool.com\u00a0\u2014 that lets any parent in the state see exactly how their school is doing. Type in a school\u2019s name and up comes its grade, the share of children reading and doing math at grade level, and how it ranks against every other school in Mississippi \u2014 and against the rest of America, too.<\/p>\n

We intended it to be a tool for families to use this summer, as they contemplate the start of the next school year and perhaps begin to wonder if their kids are in the right school. CompareMySchool.com pulls all of the data into one place, in a user-friendly format.<\/p>\n

But once we built the site, something unexpected leapt out. The tool lets you line up every school district in Mississippi and see what it spends per pupil against how its children actually perform. If the conventional wisdom were right, you would expect a clear pattern: the more a district spends, the better it does.<\/p>\n

Read more California Forces Venture Capitalists Into DEI Regime<\/a><\/p>\n

There is indeed a correlation between spending and outcomes, but it is the opposite kind of correlation. The higher the per-pupil spending, the worse the grades.<\/p>\n

Higher spending, worse results<\/h2>\n

Across Mississippi\u2019s districts, higher per-pupil spending goes hand in hand with worse outcomes, not better ones. The lowest-spending quarter of districts gets, on average, 63 percent of children to proficiency in reading and math. The highest-spending quarter manages just 36 percent. Read that again. The districts spending the most are getting barely half the results of the districts spending the least.<\/p>\n

Ocean Springs, down on the Gulf Coast, is the top-performing district in the state \u2014 more than three-quarters of its students are at proficiency \u2014 on about $10,300 per pupil. Jackson Public Schools spends $16,640 per pupil, more than 60 percent more than Ocean Springs, and gets fewer than a third of its children to proficiency. Petal spends roughly 42 percent less per pupil than Jackson, and more than doubles Jackson\u2019s results. DeSoto County, the largest district in the state, educates nearly 34,000 children on the lowest per-pupil budget in Mississippi \u2014 and still beats Jackson almost two to one.<\/p>\n

Our web tool also allows families to compare what their public school district spends against what the local private school down the road charges to do the very same thing \u2014 and the gap is startling.<\/p>\n

Jackson Public Schools spends $16,640 of public money on each child. A few minutes away, there are private schools that charge about a third of that amount. It\u2019s the same story across the state, where typical private schools charge about $7,000 a year, while often getting far better results. The public sector, it turns out, is not the cheap option.<\/p>\n

What matters is not how much a district spends, but how it spends it. This data in Mississippi strongly suggests that what we need to see are reforms that allow families dissatisfied with what their school board has to offer to have the option of taking their child\u2019s share of funding to a school outside government control.<\/p>\n

Mississippi\u2019s own data \u2014 now in the hands of every parent at\u00a0CompareMySchool.com\u00a0\u2014 makes the argument that money is not the answer. Better-run schools are, and the surest way to get more of them is to trust parents to choose.<\/p>\n

READ MORE from Douglas Carswell:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Great Nations Aren\u2019t Destroyed by Enemies. They\u2019re Destroyed by Debt.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Y\u2019all Street Is Eating Wall Street\u2019s Lunch<\/strong><\/p>\n

Douglas Carswell is the President & CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy. CompareMySchool.com is accessible to everyone online.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Read more Celebrate Good Times<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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