"There's no particular relationship between spending and educational results. Most education spending is actually on salaries, and that's allocated according to political muscle"
About this Quote
Brimelow’s line is engineered to puncture a comforting civic myth: that higher school budgets reliably buy better outcomes. The blunt opener - “no particular relationship” - performs a kind of contrarian hygiene, scrubbing away the spreadsheet pieties that let politicians claim virtue through appropriations. It’s not a nuanced econometric argument so much as a rhetorical wedge: if money doesn’t correlate with results, then the moral claim for more funding collapses into self-interest.
The subtext lands in the second sentence, where he reframes education spending as a labor story, not a children-and-learning story. “Most education spending is actually on salaries” is both descriptively plausible and strategically chosen, because it invites readers to picture a system that feeds adults first. Then comes the real charge: salaries are “allocated according to political muscle.” That phrase does a lot of work. It implies unions, bureaucracies, and local machines without naming them, turning a complex negotiation over compensation, seniority, and working conditions into a simple narrative of capture. “Muscle” suggests coercion and backroom leverage, not democratic bargaining, and nudges the reader toward suspicion of public-sector power.
Context matters: this is the kind of claim that thrives in late-20th-century debates over tax revolts, union influence, and the efficiency of public services. It also smuggles in a policy preference: shift attention from inputs to incentives, from budgets to accountability, from labor protections to “results.” The quote works because it doesn’t just criticize spending; it recasts the entire system’s motive, making education feel less like a public good and more like a patronage economy with classrooms attached.
The subtext lands in the second sentence, where he reframes education spending as a labor story, not a children-and-learning story. “Most education spending is actually on salaries” is both descriptively plausible and strategically chosen, because it invites readers to picture a system that feeds adults first. Then comes the real charge: salaries are “allocated according to political muscle.” That phrase does a lot of work. It implies unions, bureaucracies, and local machines without naming them, turning a complex negotiation over compensation, seniority, and working conditions into a simple narrative of capture. “Muscle” suggests coercion and backroom leverage, not democratic bargaining, and nudges the reader toward suspicion of public-sector power.
Context matters: this is the kind of claim that thrives in late-20th-century debates over tax revolts, union influence, and the efficiency of public services. It also smuggles in a policy preference: shift attention from inputs to incentives, from budgets to accountability, from labor protections to “results.” The quote works because it doesn’t just criticize spending; it recasts the entire system’s motive, making education feel less like a public good and more like a patronage economy with classrooms attached.
Quote Details
| Topic | Learning |
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