A surprising cross-country stylized fact is that higher public spending on education tends to lower the long-run growth rate of per capita GDP and the returns to schooling. This is contrary to the conventional wisdom that education is a major driver of growth. In this article, we revisit this issue and try to understand these puzzling facts in terms of an endogenous growth model. Our cross-country calibration of the growth model predicts that countries with a greater government involvement in education experience lower schooling efforts and lower growth. ) shows significant skepticism about the positive effect of education spending on growth. Sylwester (2000) demonstrates that the contemporaneous education expenditure has a negative effect on growth. Temple (2001) revisits the empirical evidence and shows with alternative statistical procedures that the link between education expenditure and growth is tenuous. Blankenau, Simpson, and Tomljanovich (2007) argue that government spending on education has an insignificant effect on growth for low-and middle-income countries, while it has a positive effect on rich countries.