Should more or less money be put towards funding for schools

Let's respond to my opponent's argument about how education is needed to raise the children of today to become the innovators of tomorrow. I offer the following responses. Firstly, due to an increased emphasis on standardized tests, schools are putting more emphasis on "teaching to the test" rather than important subjects. According to the National Center for Fair and Open Testing (http://www.fairtest.org...) entire subjects may be dropped from curriculum such as social studies and science, because standardized tests mandated under the No Child Left Behind act only contain mathematics and reading comprehension. This omits from the curriculum many important skills, such as writing a research paper or conducting a lab report, both of which are very important if the world wants to solve global warming, as my opponent stated, or any other problem that needs to be solved. But we have to get to the root cause of this narrowed curriculum. What was the cause of the aforementioned harms? The answer is more funding into education. It was the increased funding plans dictated in No Child Left Behind that caused schools to focus so much on standardized testing and to get rid of more important subjects. This is another empirical example of increased funding harming education. Secondly, let's go into a specific part of this argument. My opponent argued that funding is necessary to keep the students' interest in school and without it, the children would get bored and "not pay attention as much as they should". This ties back into the standardized test point, because Michael Hout and Stuart Elliott's book "Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education" states the opposite of my opponent's point. They found that when teachers have an obligation or incentive to improve their students' standardized test scores, they use different teaching methods that are disadvantageous to students. They used different strategies such as increased lecturing and directing, which decreased the students' interest and "willingness to undertake difficult academic challenges". It's actually the increase in funding that harms education, not it's lack thereof. Now let's take a look at my opponent's response to my arguments. My opponent says that spending increases actually benefit the poor more than the rich area of New Jersey. However, Kenneth Wesson of the National Association for the Education of Young Children says otherwise. He finds that there is socio-economic discrimination in education and that the poor aren't benefited as much as the rich. Then my opponent says that that we could put more money into a better police force, and crimes would be decreased. However, increasing police funding is not part of our topic, as we are discussing whether education funding should be increased. Finally my opponent declares that in a study beginning in 1955, there have been beneficial impacts of increased education funding. David Klein of California State University Northridge actually explains that in 1955, The College Entrance Examination Board established the Commission on Mathematics. This increased the quality of mathematics classes in all schools across the nation. (http://www.csun.edu...). This is significant because PBS finds that there has been a high rise in the amount of jobs that are considered "technical", or requiring advanced technology. The same source finds math education is a good way to improve the quality of those jobs (http://www.pbs.org...). Then, even if you don't believe a word I said throughout this argument, my opponent has not responded to my tradeoff argument. Thus, all my impacts still stand and have weight in this round. Because we are weighing this debate on a utilitarian framework and my opponent has not responded to this, we have to look to which side can benefit more people. Even if you think that an increase in spending would benefit every single student in the nation, you're still not benefiting as many people as the CON side. Through this argument, I prove that by not increasing education funding, mortality is being prevented in the nation, and even greater, this is preventing 50 million people from going into extreme poverty and over 200 million people being pushed near starvation. Because I can prove benefit to more people, I should be winning this round. Thank you.