A lot of that increase went towards Special Ed and administration overhead. It's hard to do a raw student/teacher ratio because today you have special Ed teach

A lot of that increase went towards Special Ed and administration overhead. It's hard to do a raw student/teacher ratio because today you have special Ed teachers with a handful of students. That didn't really exist 40-50 years ago. Pensions are another huge problem. Those big promises handed out in the 70s-80s are now coming due. There's districts spending double digits percentages of their budget paying retired teachers. So lots of money going in but bills are riding faster. But the general point is still correct. Inner city schools generally have the highest budgets per pupil in their state. Ultimately spending is not very correlated with performance. Of course, in a perfectly allocated system it wouldn't be correlated at all. Money would flow to where it was needed most until every school generated equal outcomes