Since the 1960s, school spending across the country has skyrocketed. During the 2009-10 school year, some states, however, spent vastly more money per student than others.  Click on a state in the interactive below to highlight individual details.

The second and third charts illustrate changes in state per-pupil spending from 1969-70 to 2009-10 in inflation-adjusted dollars.

Diane Ravitch Says Public School Reformers Have Got It Wrong in Reign of Error in the Texas Observer

A war is being fought that may change the future of public education as we know it. Invective has been spewed and divisions have been drawn. On one side are the self-proclaimed reformers, who push a foreboding narrative: Our public schools are in crisis. U.S. test scores are abysmal, they say.  Reformers are quick to blame this decay on incompetent teachers and the unions that protect them, whose failure, reformers say, threatens American economic supremacy, national security, our very way of life.

In one particularly egregious example, Checker Finn recently proclaimed the impending collapse of private schooling, implying strongly that private schools invariably were in trouble and unsustainable.  What Checker Finn seems to have missed is that a) overall, private school enrollment shares in the U.S. actually aren't declining (as evidenced by the American Community Survey), and b) that declining enrollments in private schools where they do exist appear relatively isolated among Catholic parochial schools - NOT NAIS/INDEPENDENT Schools.

 The State of America's Children: 2014 Report  by the Children's Defense Fund

In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson declared a War on Poverty in his State of the Union Address. Fifty years later, how have American children fared? CDF's new report The State of America's Children 2014 finds child poverty has reached record levels and children of color are disproportionately poor. This is a comprehensive compilation and analysis of the most recent and reliable national and state-by-state data on population, poverty, family structure, family income, health, nutrition, early childhood development, education, child welfare, juvenile justice, and gun violence. The report provides key child data showing alarming numbers of children at risk.

Expanding School Choice: An Education Revolution or Diversion?  by Patti Barth in The Huffington Post

House majority leader Eric Cantor (R-Va) Cantor was speaking recently at the release of the Brookings Institution's latest report on Education Choice and Competition. Calling these policies "an education revolution," the House leader baldly stated, "school choice is the surest way to break [the] vicious cycle of poverty."  Not "a solid education." School choice.  The rationale is that a free marketplace will force schools to innovate in order to compete for students. Popular schools will equate with good schools and unpopular ones will close. And thus, in Brookings words, we will raise "the quality of the product."

The best interview questions provide insight into a potential hire's thought process, critical thinking skills and overall personality, instead of just a rehearsed list of achievements accomplished and lessons learned.  "It's helpful for both job seekers and employers to familiarize themselves with the downright weird interview questions that are being used to identify great candidates," says Scott Dobroski, Glassdoor's community expert.

This marks our eighth year of handing out the Bunkum Awards, recognizing the lowlights in educational research over the past year. As long as the bunk keeps flowing, the awards will keep coming. It's the least we can do. This year's deserving awardees join a pantheon of divine purveyors of weak data, shoddy analyses, and overblown recommendations from years past. Congratulations, we guess-to whatever extent congratulations are due.

Investment in rigorous early childhood programs made Maryland's Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) district one of the strongest in the country with the highest graduation rate among the nation's largest school districts for four consecutive years. Listen to former superintendent of schools Jerry Weast share the "secrets" of the county's success. "Everything that we did could actually easily be replicated anywhere in the country." 

An investigation into charter schools' dishonest and unconstitutional science, history, and "values" lessons.   When public-school students enrolled in Texas' largest charter program open their biology workbooks, they will read that the fossil record is "sketchy." That evolution is "dogma" and an "unproved theory" with no experimental basis. They will be told that leading scientists dispute the mechanisms of evolution and the age of the Earth. These are all lies.  

Other related articles on the HML Cornerstone Flip Board

See these and other related articles in the "Cornerstone" Internet magazine.