> Funding per student is on the rise, or level on inflation-adjusted $

That's at the state level. But that doesn't account for the explosion in admin salaries and positions. The actual money a district spends on each student has been going down every year. Those funds are going more towards admin activities.

> I got ahold of all the teachers I knew and asked them what impact it would have, and their response was mostly that they would lose their school lunch benefits.

Teachers have a very poor understanding of where their funding comes from. Most just assume "property taxes", but it's far more complicated than that. The department of Ed provides a lot of funding to states that is passed through to the schools. They also enforce the education titles.

Cutting the department of Ed may not have a direct, immediate impact on classroom teachers, but it will have a large downstream effect in a few years.

> At the same time, school scores started to sag after 2014

That's around the time a bunch of districts in a state I lived in at the time had multi-year teacher pay scale freezes due to budget crunches. Not saying it's necessarily connected to the scores dropping, but still.

Total spending across the country may be high, but it's very much state-by-state and local how much is spent and where it goes. Some states pay teachers pretty well. Some states, the pay really is pretty awful. Some states are OK on staffing levels. Others are in an ongoing staffing catastrophe that's forcing them to cut school days to try to get by.

Meanwhile, school performance is heavily tied to home life and broader community support for students' families. That's why all this effort to improve schools hasn't been as effective as one might hope: the attention needs to go toward much harder problems that have little to do with schools and are really hard to get any progress on in the US. Worker protections, better and less-stressful "safety nets", better policing and a better justice system. That kind of thing. I'd look at least as much at what's been going on with those, and with security and home life for those in the lowest three quintiles of household income, as at schools themselves, to try to find reasons for trends like this.

That explosion plot is pretty bad. No y axis. Unclear if it includes tuition and loans (which are paid or owed by students). Loans are ~50% of "ED appropriations", and only ~$21 million was distributed to students in 2021. But in the plot is looks like spending was around 150 billion (hard to say with no y axis) but ~50% was loans? And the source is just a vague Dept of Ed, with a link at the very bottom of the page to every single table published by the Dept of Ed, so have fun checking the source.

I'm not criticizing your take, although I suspect teachers might lose more than their lunch, just pointing out how terrible the plot is.

You should not adjust for inflation or even for wages, but for cost of employment. The way health insurance works in the US makes public sector jobs with average wages and good benefits expensive to the employer.

I met a forensic accountant recently who mentioned a corruption investigation she participated in involving a school district nearby, several high-ranking board members and admins were on the take. She pointed out the futility of the project, it was a large sum of money for a school district, but nothing like your headline-grabbing Medicare scams. She wound up leaving the investigation due to threats to her safety and took another job. It felt like one of those unresolved endings to "The Wire".

To make your point even further, the US is near the global top in educational spending per student: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...

> When DJT talked about cancelling the Dept of Edu, I got ahold of all the teachers I knew and asked them what impact it would have, and their response was mostly that they would lose their school lunch benefits.

Not the most convincing sample size.