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.