Public education under attack: How EPI research and tools support investment in public schools
Date: May 14, 2026
On May 14, 2026, EPI’s Chief Economist, Josh Bivens; Director of EPI’s Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy, Valerie Wilson; and Economist Hilary Wething discuss public education and how critical public goods are being attacked at both the state and federal levels.
Fully funded and strong public schools—with fairly compensated educators—lead to a society with high achieving students and fewer teacher shortages that disrupt learning. Yet policy initiatives such as school vouchers threaten to divert resources from public education when what is needed is greater investment, not less.
Webinar links, notes and discussion
Timestamped themes, discussion, and resources mentioned in the webinar
6:30 Tell us about EPI’s historical work in the education space – what has it focused on, why is it important, and how does it relate to today’s debates?
Schools don’t exist separate from society – as society becomes less equal, non-school inputs into education get less equal.
If we aspire to schools that are capable of ameliorating this inequality in non-school inputs and providing an equal educational opportunity to all, we need to be realistic about the scale of resources that requires.
12:20 Pre-K is the number one aspirational policy goal for those looking to make public education more transformative going forward. What if we matched our rhetoric about how important young kids’ development was with action?
Universal pre-K is by now incredibly well-researched and would provide large social gains.
It would be essentially self-financing in the long-run.
It’s a key acknowledgement that letting social inequalities go unaddressed by schooling for the first 5 years of kids’ lives is too long – it entrenches learning gaps that are deep and hard to fully close.
15:46 How sure are we about research showing that children’s education could benefit from increasing resources to schools, and how contested is that claim?
New research turns over a previous conventional wisdom that the US spent “enough” on education has been pretty decisively overturned.
In fact, more money does improve educational achievement for students and the improvement is largest for students in poor school districts.
20:05 A new wave of research indicating large benefits from spending more on public education uses better research methods than what came before and manages to provide convincing causal evidence on this question of more money improving outcomes. Let’s walk through why this newer research is more convincing in its causal conclusions.
New research scans for times when policy or something else has led to truly exogenous changes to spending – spending changes that are unrelated to pre-existing trends of levels of student achievement.
26:40 If the evidence is strong that greater spending would help students – is the policy following the evidence?
No! The 2010s were such a disaster, COVID was welcome respite from those education spending trends. Many threats remain the on horizon.
The biggest threats are the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) and continued state-wide push for vouchers.
30:13 How does a lack of funding show up in classrooms?
Insufficient teacher and staff pay leads to teacher and staff shortages.
34:55 The teacher pay findings are so striking, particularly the really large decline since the 1990s – did we really used to pay our teachers a fully fair wage and have backslid this badly since then?
This is a case study in how the need for resources for public education is inseparable from trends in the private economy.
Teacher pay in the past was too-low relative to what would have been socially fair – but this was mostly because most teachers were women and all women’s pay was suppressed relative to men.
But, low pay of teachers caused by generalized gender pay gaps meant that this low pay wasn’t as big a barrier for attracting talented teachers (again, mostly women) into the field.
Today, women have fewer barriers to enter alternative occupations, but teacher pay has not kept pace with their wages gains in the private economy.
38:20 Thinking through the policy levers to address lots of these questions, the majority of education policy is managed locally, including funding, staffing, setting course curriculum and other school policies. How does the administration’s plan to essentially dismantle the Department of Education and “return education to the states” materially change what happens in schools?
One of the primary purposes of the Department of Education is to ensure equal access to educational opportunities for all students. Dismantling the agency compromises two of the mechanisms for doing that — federal funding to under-resourced schools and enforcement of federal civil rights laws.
The limited capacity of the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights is being weaponized in support of the administration’s anti-DEI agenda. Threats to withhold funding from schools and districts deemed to be out of step with an extremely narrow view of civil rights that isare a departure from how the agency has operated for most of its existence.
National Center for Education Statistics staffing and research grants have been cut severely. Those cuts abruptly halted much of the data collection that is critical to measuring many of the outcomes we’ve been discussing and to assessing how well the goal of equal access is being met.
47:45 Talk through some of the potential harms of vouchers – particularly harms for kids who don’t use them and remain in public schools?
Vouchers have direct costs to states. The state is now subsidizing kids to attend private school and now has fewer dollars to give to public school kids. Even worse, many of those being subsidized come from quite-affluent families.
There is also an indirect cost for the students that remain in public school.
52:03 You talked about the under-recognized harms when vouchers lead to sharp changes in enrollment for public schools – are there other threats out there that could spark the same damaging dynamic?
Any instance of a sharp change in enrollment for public schools could lead to these harms.
Anti-immigrant efforts—particularly a move to overturn the 1982 Supreme Court decision Plyler vs. Doe—could have huge unintended effects.
54:20 We talked earlier about the teacher pay penalty and how the wider labor market is really important for determining how we should think about the adequacy of society’s resources going into public education – is there another big example of how wider private-sector markets should influence how we think of education spending?
Housing markets are deeply segregated by class and race – but we assign kids to public schools based on where their family lives.
If you don’t account for this in education spending, you will allow huge resource gaps between kids’ schools to persist completely unaddressed.
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