Public schools are praised in public and criticized in private, like all tax related issues. Most of us turn our kids over to them, so surely they must have our best interest at heart, right? The problems occurring in the public school system are hardly not to see, but most tend to think that more money will help to fix these issues and therefore provide the best education possible. That's why people tend to say things like:

If schools had more money, then they would do better at educating kids.

If teachers were paid more money, then they would do better at educating kids.

If there were more taxpayer support for traditional public schools, then we would have better education outcomes.

You probably heard these kind of false statements often. This raises the question:

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Is more money really the answer?

And I have to say, no, it is not. The problem is the system of forced, public schooling itself.

Public schooling is the primary evidence that people cite to show that local government serves us, that their taxes are used to do something good. But is this true? Murray N. Rothbard's Education: Free and Compulsory explains that the true origin and purpose of public education is not so much education as we think of it, but indoctrination in the civic religion. I'll come back to that later on.

For now let's just assume that public schools are what they claim to be and we need them to get everyone as educated as possible. Following this logic, all public schools would have to provide the same quality of education. Everyone knows that this isn't the case. That leads many to a logical fallacy, including university professors like the economically illiterate Henry Louis Gates Jr.:

more money for poor school districts and more money for teachers in those school districts will lead to better education outcomes, particularly for the disadvantaged youth.

He concludes:

We have to have a massive revolution in public education in the United States.

Bus the dollars from the rich school districts to the poor districts. We need to allocate the same amount of money per student per school.

Of course this cannot work. He indeed believes in a fallacy. Just throwing more money at poorer schools obviously does not work, because it is part of the problem. The data released by the state itself clearly shows it.

The U.S. Department of Education (DOE) report highlights results of the school improvement grants, it was an effort to help the country's under-performing schools.

According to The Washington Post, this block grant program was the largest federal investment ever targeted to failing schools, sending $7 billion of taxpayer money into the program between 2010 and 2015.

The DOE report found that despite this infusion of federal dollars into the nation's worst schools, there was no difference in test scores, graduation rates, or college enrollment between the schools that received the grants and those that did not. So, even big investments in public schools don't seem to work. Nevertheless most government officials are suspicious of alternatives like homeschooling and private schooling: But it is not the fear of low test scores that is driving this, but the worry that these kids aren't learning the values that the state considers important. More money =/ better education.

Studies have already shown that.

To come back to Rothbard, in short, if we could abolish public schools and compulsory schooling laws (including the taxes for it), and replace it all with market-provided education, we would have better schools at half the price, and be freer too. We would also be a more just society, with only the customers of education bearing the costs. Let the individuals choose for themselves which school fits them the most. Mere redistribution of money isn't the answer.

“The Tom Woods Show” also produced numerous, worth to listen to podcasts on this topic: