December 16, 2013
State lotteries funding education
A sobering look at where the money actually goes -- from The Washington Post:Mega Millions: Do lotteries really benefit public schools?Reminds me of this graph from October, 2012:
State lotteries that participate in games such as Mega Millions were sold to the public as enterprises that would benefit schools with millions of dollars in proceeds a year. So has public education really received a windfall?
If you look at the payouts from lotteries to schools, you might be impressed by the numbers. In California, for example, all lottery donations to public schools from kindergarten through college, total $24,018,713,472 since 1985. Yes, that�s $24 billion. K-12 schools alone have received a total of $19.3 billion.
It makes you wonder how some California public schools have had to hold bake sales to keep the lights on, doesn�t it?
In fact, in state after state, where lotteries send millions of dollars to public education, schools are still starved. Why?
Because instead of using the money as additional funding, legislatures have used the lottery money to pay for the education budget and spent the money that would have been used had there been no lottery cash on other things. Public school budgets, as a result, haven�t gotten a boost because of the lottery funding.
In Virginia, lottery tickets have a tag�line that says �Helping Virginia�s Public Schools� and more than $5 billion in lottery proceeds have gone to public education in the last 24 years, about $450 million annually.
But, according to the Virginian-Pilot, the money is used by state lawmakers to cover education expenses rather than extra money. And when it is time to cut budgets, education doesn�t get spared.
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