On Monday I wrote about which college majors pay well and poorly, and noted pay for teachers hasn’t kept up with inflation. Further rumination about that shortfall inspired the following possible insight.
Birthrates are dropping and increasing numbers of children are from one-parent families. While these households are sometimes affluent, mostly they are not particularly well off.
For a combination of reasons substantially fewer children of the middle class are attending public schools. That equals fewer middle class parent-advocates for public school funding. Those sending children to public schools are in so many cases not those who would have the time or the mindset to be politically active.
Funding for public education is a political issue and the most politically active have the fewest children in public schools. Ergo a lack of “political attention” paid to public ed.
I have no data demonstrating whether this hypothesis is likely, but the reasoning seems linear and sensible.
