03/24/2025
Borrowed from Matt Townsend
President Trump claimed yesterday that we spend more on education than anyone else but get little in return (That's not actually true, but it feels true). At first glance, this seems like a fair question: Why, with all this money, do our schools still struggle? Why do our students lag behind?
Education isn’t just about numbers. We are about children—about what happens when a five-year-old walks into a classroom hungry, or when an eighth grader has moved schools five times in three years because her family can’t afford rent. It’s about what stress and uncertainty do to young minds.
Take two children. One grows up in a home where dinner is always on the table, where there’s a quiet space to do homework, where books line the shelves, and where bedtime stories teach new words every night. Another child wakes up to an eviction notice taped to the door, spends hours in a crowded apartment with no place to study, and learns quickly that asking for a snack might get him snapped at—because food is running low again.
Both children walk into the same classroom. One is ready to learn. The other is ready to survive.
Education in America is a stone house built on sand. Unlike countries that outperform us—Finland, Canada, Japan—we don’t start by making sure all kids have a strong foundation. We let funding depend on ZIP codes, so the children who need the most help get the least. We rely on property taxes, meaning that kids in wealthier neighborhoods get better schools, better teachers, and more opportunities, while kids in struggling communities fight for scraps.
Cortisol—the stress hormone—changes a child’s brain. When kids live in chaos, their brains are wired for fight or flight, not for learning algebra or writing essays. Science tells us this. Teachers see it every day. I taught a child whose father was shot in the head while she was three; she was in his arms when it happened. She weighed 55lbs in the sixth grade.
Other countries spend more on early childhood education, on school counselors, on mental health services—things that give struggling kids like her a fighting chance. We pour money into standardized tests instead, hoping that if we just measure failure hard enough, it will fix itself.
And then we wonder why we fall behind.
The truth is, our spending "problem" isn’t just about how much—we’re a wealthy nation, and we do spend a lot on everything. But we don’t invest. We don’t invest in teachers, even as we expect them to be educators, counselors, social workers, parental figures, and saviors. We don’t invest in early childhood education, even though we know that’s where gaps begin and is the only place they can be fixed. And we don’t invest in our most vulnerable kids, instead blaming them when they struggle to compete with students in countries where food, housing, and healthcare are not left to chance.
Education is not a business transaction where more money guarantees a better product. It’s about people—children, teachers, families. It’s about what happens when a child walks into a school building each morning, and whether that school is a place where they have an actual chance to feel safe, supported, and thrive.
So yes, we spend a lot. But until we spend in ways that give every child—not just the privileged ones—the chance to succeed, we’ll keep failing, no matter how much money we throw at the problem. Schools don't create these problems; we just try to manage the results with far short of the immense resources required to fix a system that allows kids to be crushed before they even come into the world.
