Education spending in Kentucky has risen dramatically, but that is not translated to higher test scores, so says a new report from the conservative leaning Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy Solutions that looked at state trends in K through 12 education over the past three decades.

We spoke to the author of the report to find out what the data revealed about test scores, teacher salaries, and who's getting hired most in schools.

My take on this is a lot of people don't have their facts.

And so that was a big part of this is to get the facts out there.

This year, there's going to be a obviously in the state legislature, it's a budget year.

So there's going to be discussion of K-12 funding.

There's also a host of education issues that that are going to come up.

And so having getting people the facts about what's been going on, we're spending with test scores, with teachers and so on.

I think it's very important so that we kind of are coming at this from the same basis.

In fact, overall, the test score especially relative to the so the changes in funding, the funding has doubled, more than doubled since 1990.

And the test scores are very modest change now.

This is not to implicate any particular school, Right.

This doesn't look at particular issue, but this looks at kind of the entire public education system.

And overall, it's not showing much change.

And in these test scores and these are, I think, a regard as basic skills.

This is fourth and eighth grade reading and math.

I think the the intent was of the funding was to have a substantial change on these basic skills.

And my reading of this is there really has been only very modest changes and in fact lately declines in these basic skills, despite the the more than more than doubling the spending or the funding teacher salaries is not the reason for this increase in in in funding and spending that we've seen the increase in in funding far outstrips any changes in teacher salaries.

And in fact, in the last decade teacher salaries have actually gone down.

When you adjust for inflation overall over this 30 year time period, the funding per pupil has more than doubled and teacher salaries are they fallen in the last in inflation adjusted terms have fallen in the last decade.

Non teacher staffing grew very dramatically in the nineties and early 2000 and it's staying particularly especially large.

It has not shrunk relative to the student base.

That's everything.

Everything except the teachers.

That would be the administrators, that would be the secretaries, that would be the janitors.

Just everything.

Any other any other staffing that a school has.

I'm putting these these figures out there for people to contemplate and and come to their conclusions.

I think that it's important to be competitive for teachers, especially good teachers in any business.

Right.

Or any enterprise that's important to be competitive for the folks that are important to your enterprise.

So and that's something for for folks to think about is this are we no longer being competitive with with the salaries going down?

And I guess different people may take away different things, but at least we're going to have the same set of facts to look at.

And I think looking at these with what the expectation that we do want a strong schooling system, we do want effectiveness, we do want our kids to to do well and we want to do that in an efficient way.

Governor Andy Beshear unveiled his proposed state budget that included an 11% pay raise for teachers and other public school employees.

However, Senate President Robert Stivers and House Speaker David Osborne said instead of across the board pay raises, they would prefer districts get the funding and decide how to allocate it.