Revealing Failures in the History of School Finance

Both the anomalies of education history, and its less surprising contrasts, fit broad patterns that can be revealed and partially explained using low-tech methods. Over most of human history, contrasts in the output of education were driven mainly by contrasts in the supply of tax support for mass education. Exogenous influences on the demand for, and the private supply of, education played only lesser roles. Pro-growth public education could have emerged a century or two earlier than it did, had the leading countries of Western Europe mustered the political will to fund it. Government underinvestment in mass education is demonstrated for England and Wales between 1717 and 1891. Differences in political support still account for most of today's education anomalies where the contrasts involve less developed regions