With one exception, I’d strongly recommend Ellen O’Connell Whittet’s recent report on a peculiar contrast in American literacy. As the …Continue reading →
With one exception, I’d strongly recommend Ellen O’Connell Whittet’s recent report on a peculiar contrast in American literacy.
As the author has documented, an impressive revival in the nation’s number of independent bookstores has proceeded almost step-by-step with the discouraging news that “Reading scores for American high school seniors recently fell to their lowest point since the [U.S. government’s] National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) first administered the assessment in 1992.”
And this lowest point is really low in absolute, not just relative terms: “Only 35 percent of seniors tested as proficient in reading. Nearly a third scored below basic—meaning they couldn’t reliably locate details in a text to understand its meaning.”
At least as bad: “The decline precedes the pandemic and is steepest among students who were already struggling.”
So what’s the exception? Whittet’s claim that the literacy crisis has emerged “in under-resourced schools, rural communities, and households without the discretionary income to browse a charming bookshop on a Saturday afternoon.”
No doubt American public schools have suffered many problems for many years. But a lack of money seems far down the list. In fact, when broken down to the state level, the national reading stats that Whittet cites have recently been showing that much of the greatest progress has been made by states with low-ish levels of education spending per student, and many of the worst results have come from states that spend robustly on their schools.
And many of the strongly performing states have lots of poor rural communities.
The reading trends were nicely summarized by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof (not my favorite pundit!):
“Louisiana ranks No. 1 in the country in recovery from pandemic losses in reading….”
Moreover, “Once an educational laughingstock, Mississippi now ranks ninth in the country in fourth-grade reading levels — and after adjusting for demographics such as poverty and race, Mississippi ranks No. 1, while Louisiana ranks No. 2, according to calculations by the Urban Institute.”
For good measure, “Black fourth graders in Mississippi are on average better readers than those in Massachusetts, which is often thought to have the best public school system in the country (and one that spends twice as much per pupil).”
And crucially, Mississippi and Louisiana spend much less than the $16,526 per pupil public K-12 spending that the United States on average spent according to the latest available (fiscal 2023 statistics). The Mississippi figure was just $12,324, the U.S. Census Bureau most recently estimated. That ranked it Number 46 out of the fifty states. The higher Louisiana number was still just $15,581, which ranked it Number 30. (See here.)
The correlation between education spending and student achievement is at least as striking at the other end of the spectrum.
California, for instance, spends $20,791 per K-12 public school pupils per year – well above the national average. Yet according to the latest NAEP (often called “the Nation’s Report Card”), the Golden State’s fourth grade reading proficiency level was just 21 percent (versus a 23 percent national average), and for eighth graders, 24 percent (versus a 26 percent national average).
For Los Angeles, the situation is even worse. Its Unified School District spends $27,073 per K-12 public school pupil per year according to one (unofficial) 2025 estimate. But its fourth grade reading proficiency rate is a measly 18 percent. And its eighth grade reading proficiency rate was exactly the same.
How about the performance of the nation’s top state per pupil public school spender? That would be New York, at $31,918 – about twice the national average.
For those taxpayer dollars, New Yorkers got a 2024 fourth grade reading proficiency rate of 22 percent and an eighth grade score of 26 percent. The fourth graders’ performance was a percentage point below the national average and the eight graders’ performance a percentage point above.
New York City taxpayers should be even more upset. Their annual per pupil K-12 cost has hit $44,000, but just 19 percent of fourth graders were rated reading proficient in 2024 and 24 percent of eighth graders (both below the national average).
In all fairness, part of the difference in education costs between the high and low spending states stems from big differences in living costs. But this gap hardly explains all the difference.
For instance, this website says that living costs are 40.4 percent more expensive in New York State than in Mississippi. But the former’s annual per pupil K-12 spending is more than twice as high.
The same source pegs New York State’s living costs as 32.1 percent higher than Louisiana’s. But its annual per pupil K-12 spending is nearly twice as high.
According to that MyLifeElsewhere.com site, the same pattern holds when comparing California and Mississippi but not for California and Louisiana.
Moreover, some big spending states are delivering good educational value for their people. As mentioned earlier, Massachusetts is Number Five in America for annual per pupil K-12 spending. At both fourth grade and eighth grade, its public school students registered higher than the national average reading proficiency scores. New Jersey, the Number Three spender, generated similar performances. (See here and here.)
Overall, though, the relationship between state (and city) education spending and student performance…just isn’t. To fix the nation’s generally failing public schools, Americans will have to look beyond money.
