What nonsense, firstly OP clearly is specifically referring to the budget outlay for education, and even if taken more broadly I can assure you throughout the world there are plenty of governments whose spending is constrained by current income and who very much do aim to minimise expenditure for a given outcome (predictably often with the effect of greatly worsening outcomes).
Maybe you'd prefer it reframed as: elected officials want to minimize spending on line-items they don't care about in order to spend on things they do care about.
What are you talking about? Education budgets are almost comically prone to budget cuts, it's one of the most contentious facets of government spending (at least in the U.S.)
Maybe not in the states you’ve lived in, but this was very much the hypothesis behind Sam Brownback’s experiment in Kansas. Beliefs in a strong version of the crowding out effect result in states trying to cut their budgets.
Maybe the word "lockdown" means something different to you. But in my state (IL), we never had a "lockdown" in any sense of that word.
In retrospect, in particular (to use an example from another area of the USA), the state of NY and NYC did not take COVID-19 seriously. Even while supposedly concerned about the spread of COVID-19, they were returning known-infected people to old folk homes. This was not a lockdown action...
The reasons that the USA response to COVID-19 was X and not Y are a lot more complex than the simple statement "because the administration is incompetent". The full history of how well the USA did (including internal geographic areas vs. others) vs. the rest of the world is still to be written.
This is a joke statement right? There is no state in the history of the world that attempts to do this.