A new study has found that in spite of a dramatic increase in the amount of taxpayer dollars spent on public school education, student achievement remains mediocre.

Watchdog.org is reporting that the study, entitled "State Education Trends: Academic Performance and Spending over the Past 40 Years" by Andrew Coulson of the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom, has found no correlation between the amount of taxpayer dollars spent on schools and improvements in student performance.

“The takeaway from this study is that what we’ve done over the past 40 years hasn’t worked,” Coulson said. “The average performance change nationwide has declined three percent in mathematical and verbal skills. Moreover, there’s been no relationship, effectively, between spending and academic outcomes.”

Watchdog reports that in spite of the fact that spending has tripled and the number of school employees has almost doubled since 1970, reading, math and science scores for students has remained stagnant.

“That is remarkably unusual,” Coulson says in the study. “In virtually every other field, productivity has risen over this period thanks to the adoption of countless technological advances — advances that, in many cases, would seem ideally suited to facilitating learning. And yet, surrounded by this torrent of progress, education has remained anchored to the riverbed, watching the rest of the world rush past it.”

Some wonder how this can be if students do so much better at private schools which charge tuition.

Coulson responds: “Actually, the average per-pupil spending in private schools is substantially below the average per-pupil spending in government schools.”

According to prior research that he conducted on the state of Arizona, average per-pupil spending at private schools was only 66 percent of the cost of public schools. National studies have found that the average cost per pupil in U.S. public schools exceeds $11,000.

"There are many states in which you can find very many private schools for half that amount, certainly many for three-quarters of that,” Coulson said.

In other words, when it comes to student education in U.S. public schools, parents are not getting what they pay for.

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