EDITORIAL: Department of Education report finds program that showered billions on struggling public schools had little effect

The notion that there’s nothing wrong with the public schools that more tax money can’t cure has graced the top of every education union talking-point memo for decades.

What to make, then, of a recent report which found that a federal program which lavished billions of dollars on low-performing public schools across the country had done virtually nothing to improve achievement?

The analysis looked at the Education Department’s School Improvement Grants, first implemented under President George W. Bush in 2001. In 2009, President Barack Obama made the program a priority and spending exploded — since then, the feds have doled out $7 billion to 1,800 schools.

The result? “No significant impacts on math or reading test scores, high school graduation or college enrollment,” the Wall Street Journal noted this week. “The overall story there is really depressing,” Robin Lake, director of a national education research and policy center, told the newspaper. “It’s frustrating.”

The Education Department, the Washington Post revealed, “published the findings on the website of its research division on [Jan. 18], hours before President Obama’s political appointees walked out the door.”

Don’t expect any of this to dissuade those in the education establishment for whom the “just give us more money” argument has become a reflexive ideological mantra. But the federal report shows once again that those who argue more cash is a panacea for our struggling public schools have foresaken reality for “alternative facts.”