President Obama says public investment in schools was “allowed to wither” as a result of the “trickle-down ideology” of recent decades. There’s no clear trend for public spending on education as a percentage of the U.S. economy, but public investment hasn’t withered.
Jeb Bush has repeatedly — and falsely — claimed that the United States spends “more per student than any country in the world.” Luxembourg, Norway and Switzerland all spend more than the U.S. on elementary and secondary education.
The Sunday talk shows included exaggerated claims from both sides about the debate over automatic spending cuts scheduled to take effect March 1:
Education Secretary Arne Duncan said “as many as 40,000 teachers could lose their jobs.” But that assumes the entire $2.8 billion in looming DOE cuts would come from teacher salaries. Duncan himself testified there would be cuts elsewhere — including cutting “more than 70,000 students from grant and work study programs”
President Obama exaggerates the potential benefits of his ambitious plan for universal preschool, as he first outlined in the State of the Union and repeated elsewhere since then: Obama says every dollar invested in “high quality” preschool can return “seven dollars later on” but that is based on an economic analysis of a small, two-year program that targeted disadvantaged youth …
A new Obama campaign ad repeats old distortions in a homestretch appeal to voters.
The ad claims Romney would make “catastrophic cuts to education,” but the ad cites an editorial that says Romney has promised to cut discretionary spending — not necessarily education.
The ad repeats the claim that Romney’s tax plan includes a massive tax cut for millionaires “while middle class families pay more.” Romney insists he won’t do that. The ad cites an analysis by the Tax Policy Center,
Two ads from Crossroads GPS paint incomplete and misleading pictures of Tim Kaine’s support for cutting education and defense spending.
One ad says that “when Tim Kaine proposed harsh funding cuts for Virginia schools, one Democrat called it ‘a kick in the teeth.’ ” It’s true that the top official in one wealthy county did that — when the then-Virginia governor proposed a one-year delay to a scheduled change that would have prevented cuts for two-thirds of the state’s poorest school districts.
A TV ad in support of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie supplies some misleading information about the governor’s record. The ad praises Christie and unnamed “reformers from both sides” for:
“Creating jobs.” But the state has added only 37,100 jobs since he took office in January 2010. New Jersey and national unemployment rates were identical (9.7 percent) when Christie became governor. The state’s unemployment rate is now 9.1 percent — a full percentage point higher than the national average and fifth highest among all states.
Rick Santorum is off base when he criticizes college as a place where young people lose their “faith commitment.” In fact, the percentage of those with weakened religious affiliations is higher for those who don’t go to college.
Santorum also twists Obama’s words when he accuses him of snobbery for pushing a college education. In fact, the president also urged vocational training.
On Feb. 26, ABC’s “This Week” host George Stephanopoulos asked Santorum why he called President Obama “a snob”
Rick Santorum incorrectly claimed that “one of three children drop out of school” in the United States. The 2009 dropout rate was 8.1 percent — slightly higher than it was in 2008, but down significantly from the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and even early 2000s, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
It’s true that a higher percentage of students in the U.S. fail to graduate on time — about 23 percent in the 2009-10 school year.
The White House misleadingly suggests that the Republicans’ plan to pay for a payroll tax cut would result in “forcing cuts to things like education and medical research.” The bill passed by House Republicans mentions no such cuts. And while the bill may or may not require cuts to discretionary spending, there’s no reason those cuts would have to come from popular programs like education or medical research.
The White House’s nearly six-minute “white board” video,