Welcome to Econ Talk, brought to you by the Library of Economics and Liberty

I'm your host Russ Roberts of George Mason University, podcasting today from

Stanford University's Hoover Institution. My guest today is Rick Hannacheck, Rick

is the Paul and Jean Hanna senior fellow here at the Hoover Institution and he's

written widely on education and education policy. Rick, I'd like to start our

conversation by asking you what you and others have found in trying to understand

what makes students better educated. For example, we hear a lot about the need to

increase expenditures on schooling as a way of improving education. What's been

the pattern of educational spending in America in the recent past? Is it

up or down? Well, it's quite dramatically up over in fact the whole century of

the 20th century up till now. Many people think that in fact we've been starving

our schools and holding back on funds but in fact funding has increased on a

per pupil basis quite dramatically and quite steadily throughout as long as we

can tell. So since 1960 the real spending after we adjust for inflation per

pupil has more than tripled. Tripled in real terms that is the real resources that

are going toward education per student tripled since 1960. That's an incredible

increase and how's that turned out? What's been the impact of that expenditure

increase on educational outcomes? Well that's been the disappointment. What we've

seen is that test scores of students have been virtually constant or flat from

1970 through today. We regularly test a random sample of U.S. students in

reading math science and those test scores while they've jiggled around a

little bit have essentially not changed. So we've spent dramatically more

...