This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, May 7th, 2018. I'm Caleb Brown.

The seemingly sudden uprising of teachers in several states is over money.

Money for public schools, money for pensions, money for salaries.

Cato's Neil McCluskey looked at some of the recent data on school spending.

We spoke Friday.

Several states have had, let's just call them disputes between teachers and the government over benefits and over education funding, which of course

is strongly correlated with pay because teachers are the most expensive part of a school.

So what have you looked at with regard to the data on at the very least per pupil funding for education in these states?

Well, so the first thing is that as long as I've been involved in education policy

and probably long before that.

We've always heard people saying the public schools or our particular school or our district

is underfunded or funding has been slashed or we're cutting to the bone

and things like that and if you look at per pupil's expenditures at least the

national average and you go back, really you could go back from

2008 back to the 1930s and it's been a tale of almost endless increases in

spending huge increase. almost endless increases in spending.

Huge increases, even adjusting for inflation for many, many decades.

You could probably go back a century if you wanted to although federal data gets inconsistent before the 30s

But anyway we've seen huge increases in spending until you get to 2007-08

Which is the when the Great Recession really hits. And nationally and in many states, we actually have seen kind of a sort of evening out, in some cases some cuts in what was spent per pupil.

So it may just be what we've been looking at now since the Great Recession is actually a case of reality coinciding with the

rhetoric. It's not that I think necessarily that the rhetoric wasn't there before, was but but at least since 0708 we've seen

...