One of the greatest lies ever told to the American public – aside from President Obama’s “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan” – is the notion that our public schools are under funded.

A new Cato Institute study, State Education Trends: Academic Performance and Spending over the Past 40 Years, uses adjusted state SAT score averages to track how educational performance trends compare to state spending over the last four decades.   The study’s conclusion is appalling:

The performance of 17-year-olds has been essentially stagnant across all subjects despite a near tripling of the inflation- adjusted cost of putting a child through the K–12 system.

Here is what that trend looks like in Colorado:

Conservatives have been beating this drum for a while, but it’s hard for parents to believe them when the school supply list never gets any shorter and fees keep increasing.

The truth is, too much of the money we send to our schools ends up in administration and not the classrooms.  We saw this debate play out last summer when Democrats tried to pass Amendment 66, a billion dollar tax increase for education.  While the measure failed miserably, it had more to do with the fact that voters were against the billion-dollar tax increase part rather than the spending more money on education part.

But lack of proper funding is clearly not the reason for stagnant results, and it’s time that the mainstream media start calling the Left out when they try to make that claim.