Among 23 states examined in a recent report, Missouri led the race to the bottom in reducing education as a share of the state's overall funding, but kids in Nevada may be the biggest losers.
In an attempt to empirically measure the extent to which states have used federal dollars to replace state funding, researchers looked at how states have prioritized education. Assuming a waning tide lowers all boats, they measured education spending as a percentage of overall state spending and compared from the year before stimulus dollars to the year after.
Missouri reduced spending as a percentage of the state budget by 5.1%, from 41% of the overall budget to 35.9%. But the second largest drop came in Nevada, where education spending dropped 4.3%, from 23.8% to just 19.5 % of the state's overall budget--the lowest among states in the study.
Ten states in the study increased spending as a percentage of the overall budget. Is education a priority in your state?
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