A recent Mercatus Center report found that in 1920 the federal government spent just under 29 million in today’s dollars on education costs—that comes out to be only $1.34 per student. Today, that cost has ballooned to approximately $11,000 per student. While the funding has spiked, there seem to be few indications that additional funds are improving academic performance.
The U.S. Constitution is conspicuously silent on the topic of education, indicating (per the 10th Amendment) that the decisions remains at the hands of individual states. Despite this, federal education laws and regulations continue to bloat the system and have caused spending in the arena to skyrocket over the past few decades.
