Florida Teacher Union groups have claimed that increasing tax dollars for teacher and administrative pay would improve students’ standardized test scores.
However, Open the Books (OTB) reviewed 12,531 school districts across the country, and what they found was the opposite: that spending more money did not improve student scores.
OTB looked at the proprietary database of government salaries across the U.S. and calculated how much each U.S. state increased its total public-school payrolls. They compared each state’s ranking on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), measuring math and reading for 4th and 8th graders.
“While schools may hope that increasing their payroll will help their students outperform other states, there is little evidence in the data to support that claim,” said OTB.
The worst-performing states, which saw a higher number of administrative staff and their pay rise, yet still saw scores drop, were California and New York.
Christian Barnard, assistant director of education reform at the Reason Foundation, looked at per-pupil spending in the U.S. and found that it increased by almost 21% from 2002 to 2019, but 64% of the increased spending was used to pay benefits for instructional and support staff. Barnard says if benefit pay had instead only kept pace with inflation, U.S. schools would have saved nearly $70 billion in 2019 — enough to give every teacher in America a $20,913 raise.
In Florida, OTB reported that Miami-Dade County Public Schools had the second-best exam scores in 2024 while spending just $6,380 on payroll per student – the fifth-lowest among the 25 large cities. Hillsborough County spent only $5,330 per student on payroll, the second lowest among the large cities. Its students’ exam scores ranked 5th.
Another area where less money is being spent on the classroom comes from the funding of school pensions. OTB notes that districts are spending more money paying off pension debts than on students. In 2019, school districts around the U.S. spent $4.36 billion on pensions, but that number jumped to $5.02 billion in 2023.
