A large portion of voters who believe that they are getting scammed on education spending are willing to subject themselves to more intense scamming with the hope that said superscam might, somehow, hopefully, maybe, perhaps, eventually turn legit and produce wonderful results.

By Chuck Rogér

Some of the results of a recent Rasmussen poll set me to thinkin’, as people say in some parts of America.

Nearly three-quarters of voters think that taxpayers are not getting their money’s worth from public schools. Only 11 percent think that the taxpayer “investment” in public schools is a good deal.

Okay so far. Nothing unexpected, given the flat student performance over four decades beginning in 1970, a time during which the inflation-adjusted cost of an education nearly quadrupled. Indeed, with a record like that, it’s a bit depressing that 100 percent of voters aren’t hacked off about how their education dollars are being spent.

But then things get quite interesting. When asked to judge whether spending more on public education would improve student performance, only 41 percent of voters gave an indication of being aware of reality. Only those 41 percent correctly answered that spending more would not improve student performance.

So three-quarters of voters think that taxpayers aren’t getting their money’s worth from public education. But only 41 percent of voters see throwing yet more money at schools as a waste. The conclusion is inescapable. There are voting Americans who know that their money is wasted on public schools by bungling bureaucrats, but still might be open to throwing yet more money at the bureaucrats, presumably in anticipation of eventually getting their money’s worth.

And we haven’t even gotten to the weirdest of the poll’s results.

According to Rasmussen, more than half (54 percent) of voters “continue to believe that the government [my emphasis] does not spend enough on public education[.]”

Let’s summarize the picture.

A large portion of voters who believe that they are getting scammed on education spending are willing to subject themselves to more intense scamming with the hope that said superscam might, somehow, hopefully, maybe, perhaps, eventually turn legit and produce wonderful results.

Sometimes I wonder why I bother to try to understand people at all.

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