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"K-12 schools spend $666.9 billion or $13,185 per pupil annually." - https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statistics https://educationdata.org/pu

"K-12 schools spend $666.9 billion or $13,185 per pupil annually." - https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statistics https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti... We invest plenty. We just don't get a great return on our investment.

kevingadd 4y ago
By what standard is that actually "plenty"? Is that $13185 enough to properly fund all the services a child needs for a proper education? And if it's not, why not? How much do you believe we should be spending per student? You can point at a big number and say 'that's enough' but we spend large amounts of money on all sorts of things, the number being large doesn't mean it's sufficient. There are tons of children in need of an education out there and they're frequently crammed into overcrowded schools in buildings badly needing maintenance, while teachers have to buy supplies out of pocket. Maybe the answer is that all that money is being siphoned away and we would be fine if we redistributed it correctly, but the premise that we're already investing enough seems pretty questionable to me without proof.
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  I mean, if you have a class of 20 students (which seems on the smaller end), that would be a "revenue" of over a quarter million per teacher, right? I feel like we should be able to do a pretty good job with that while paying a teacher a decent salary.
  - mattkrause 4y ago
    Not really. That class of twenty needs a building to take place, which in turn needs upkeep. It needs supplies and equipment (workbooks, computers, dodgeballs), and it needs some level of administration[0]. The teachers presumably want benefits too. At a university, the “overhead” costs of research [1] are on the order of 50%: doing $100k worth of research require another $50k to keep the lights on, the building clean, and the library stocked. A fully-loaded salary with benefits is also about 30-50 percent higher than the take-home amount. Similar math gets you to about $100k, which would be a massive improvement but nowhere near the quarter-mil you might expect. However, the average also hides the fact that student spending usually isn’t uniform: it’s not the case that each student costs $13k; it might be more like 9k for 19/20 students and a lot more for the one student with special needs (who might require a FTE on their own). This doesn’t scale nearly as well, but it’s important if you want to give everyone a fair shot at success. [0] The right amount of admin is obviously debatable, but you clearly need some level of management and organization: somebody needs to make class schedules, run payroll, etc. [1] These rates are negotiated with the federal government, and so theoretically reflect the actual costs pretty well. It’s not obvious how well they translate to a K-12 environment: researchers need more specialized services…but also are a lot less likely to draw on the walls.
    - hotpotamus 4y ago
      I did use the word revenue in scare quotes for a reason - I don't expect that all that money could be given directly to the teacher. On the other hand, the state should be able to achieve quite high economies of scale on administration and purchasing (whether they actually do is something else), and there's no profit to make at the end of the day. I was actually thinking 50% would make the math easy but probably be a bit unrealistic, but I arrive at about the same place as you I think. Also I'd imagine that most classes are larger than 20, but hopefully smaller than 30.
- GiorgioG 4y ago
  By the standard that we're systematically mismanaging the funds we are spending. The bussing system is absurdly inefficient and wholly unnecessary. Neighborhood schools used to be a thing. Some school systems offer 'gold plated' healthcare plans where they include cosmetic surgery as a benefit to a school system that needs more money spent towards actual education. I'm not advocating doing away with the public education system, but we're being swindled. It's not the teachers' fault (obviously), but the system as a whole. Every little town has its own school system, administrative overhead, etc.
  - mattkrause 4y ago
    > Some school systems offer 'gold plated' healthcare plans So? If you want good teachers--or at, some point, any teachers--you need to offer working conditions that are good enough to attract them, just like any other job. Spending on benefits "instead of" education is a false dichotomy; in fact, I'd say that's the central thesis of the article.
    - GiorgioG 4y ago
      This was the school system I went to in a rust-belt city, the teachers were not 'good' on average.
      - mattkrause 4y ago
        But if you tried to hire teachers while offering less, would they have been better? My guess is no; they'd have been even worse.
- Beltalowda 4y ago
  The figure in the Netherlands is about €6.7k for an elementary school pupil (until age ~12, not sure how that compares to K-12 exactly). So that's a little over half of what the US spends, and I think it's fair to say that Dutch elementary education is at least roughly comparable to US education (maybe one is a little bit better than the other, but I'd be surprised if the US one was twice as good). I don't know about other countries, but this is one metric to give an approximation about what is "plenty", although there's the caveat that you can't compare this directly: I've heard about "school lunches" and "school nurses" in the US, and those kind of things are virtually unheard of over here.
  - kevingadd 4y ago
    Yeah, we spend money to operate school police departments here too. I totally believe you that the Netherlands' spending is adequate given costs and services, though. I assume you don't have private health insurance plans in the Netherlands either? Those will raise the cost per teacher in the US.
SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
I don’t think it’s fair to assume the money is evenly split. Public schooling must also support students who need much more support, ranging from ESL to a variety of disabilities with a variety of severity. If you think of specialized needs students the 13k number looks ridiculous. 13k is an alarmingly low amount of support for dyslexia, or autism, or diabetes.
- nyokodo 4y ago
  > If you think of specialized needs students the 13k number looks ridiculous. You’re comparing an average per student spend to a high needs minority. Average spend should be compared to the average student who does not have dyslexia etc. A larger than average portion will be spent on kids with special needs due to special facilities, smaller class sizes, and specialist teachers etc.
  - Wowfunhappy 4y ago
    But I think the $13K number includes those outliers, no? If I understand GP, they're arguing the average for 90% of students is probably significantly lower.
Wowfunhappy 4y ago
I'd argue $13K per student is quite low relative to the services expected. I mean, compare that to the price of college tuition. Now, college is too expensive and I certainly wouldn't want to replicate that problem in K-12 schools. But... well, in some ways colleges have it easier, because the students are older and can be expected to be more independent. You can't have a 100-person lecture in a K-12 setting (not that I love classes like that at the college level either).
- lr4444lr 4y ago
  Fine, compare it to portion of GDP. Like healthcare, we spend a lot and get poor return if you measure objectively by things like standardized tests, unemployment, imprisonment, etc.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- mattkrause 4y ago
  Yup. $13k/year works out to about $10 per pupil-hour, and even less once you include costs like the building and work done out-of-hours (grading, lesson planning). I’m pretty sure I made something like that babysitting in junior high!
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - prirun 4y ago
    "Pupil-hour" makes no sense in a classroom environment. When you were babysitting, they didn't pay you $10/hr per kid.
    - mattkrause 4y ago
      Many people did, actually. The amount of work/responsibility definitely scales with the number of kids, and it's not exactly linear either: one will color quietly, two might play together--or fight, and three or more...yikes. I mentioned the rate because it surprised me it was so close. I'd expect that it costs more to actually educate a kid, and of course, the parents provided the house (and often ice cream and HBO), whereas that rate includes everything.
horsawlarway 4y ago
I'm not actually sure that's "plenty". For comparison - we currently pay more per year to keep our 1 year old child in daycare (roughly ~15,000/yr) and for daycare we literally only expect them to keep him alive & clean. And this is considered a "cheap" daycare. Most places in our area (the much cheaper south-west side of Atlanta) still charge more than 1600/m or almost 20k/yr. We certainly don't expect them to be significantly enriching his education experience (although the simple exposure to other kids will likely do that at this age). We also don't expect the employees to have any sort of educational/vocational training to excel at teaching, or expect them to perform any sort of off-the-clock work (ex: grading, class prep, parent-teacher meetings, etc). I expect them to be mostly high-school graduates with a background check. So I look at that number, and while it's certainly a large number if you're making 1 teacher manage 30 kids, I don't really know that it's a number that results in viable conditions to truly "educate" children. I strongly suspect that education is highly dependent on the family at home, and that's becoming harder to meaningful do as more and more families are forced to have both parents work full time.
- millzlane 4y ago
  >I strongly suspect that education is highly dependent on the family at home, and that's becoming harder to meaningful do as more and more families are forced to have both parents work full time. This is a big part of it. Education doesn't stop when the school bell rings.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - notch656a 4y ago
    But I was told by HN the state is responsible for providing an education for children. If the parent is responsible instead, then I'd like to be able to opt out of paying taxes for schools and instead send my kid to a private school.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  >For comparison - we currently pay more per year to keep our 1 year old child in daycare (roughly ~15,000/yr) and for daycare we literally only expect them to keep him alive & clean You cannot compare the per child costs of taking care of a kid who cannot go to the toilet themselves or eat by themself with a kid who is much more self sufficient. The person taking care of a baby (or 4 babies) might need to be much less qualified than an AP physics teacher in high school, but the labor (and liability) costs do not necessarily scale exactly with the minimum qualifications needed to be an AP physics teacher versus a daycare teacher.
_hcuq 4y ago
And yet a teacher with 30 kids in the class gets maybe 80k in a better paying state. 30 x 13k is $390k…. Something isn’t adding up. What are all the overheads?
- GiorgioG 4y ago
  Every rinky dink town has their own school system, superintendent, administrative overhead…

kevingadd 4y ago

By what standard is that actually "plenty"? Is that $13185 enough to properly fund all the services a child needs for a proper education? And if it's not, why not? How much do you believe we should be spending per student? You can point at a big number and say 'that's enough' but we spend large amounts of money on all sorts of things, the number being large doesn't mean it's sufficient. There are tons of children in need of an education out there and they're frequently crammed into overcrowded schools in buildings badly needing maintenance, while teachers have to buy supplies out of pocket. Maybe the answer is that all that money is being siphoned away and we would be fine if we redistributed it correctly, but the premise that we're already investing enough seems pretty questionable to me without proof.

hotpotamus 4y ago
I mean, if you have a class of 20 students (which seems on the smaller end), that would be a "revenue" of over a quarter million per teacher, right? I feel like we should be able to do a pretty good job with that while paying a teacher a decent salary.
- mattkrause 4y ago
  Not really. That class of twenty needs a building to take place, which in turn needs upkeep. It needs supplies and equipment (workbooks, computers, dodgeballs), and it needs some level of administration[0]. The teachers presumably want benefits too. At a university, the “overhead” costs of research [1] are on the order of 50%: doing $100k worth of research require another $50k to keep the lights on, the building clean, and the library stocked. A fully-loaded salary with benefits is also about 30-50 percent higher than the take-home amount. Similar math gets you to about $100k, which would be a massive improvement but nowhere near the quarter-mil you might expect. However, the average also hides the fact that student spending usually isn’t uniform: it’s not the case that each student costs $13k; it might be more like 9k for 19/20 students and a lot more for the one student with special needs (who might require a FTE on their own). This doesn’t scale nearly as well, but it’s important if you want to give everyone a fair shot at success. [0] The right amount of admin is obviously debatable, but you clearly need some level of management and organization: somebody needs to make class schedules, run payroll, etc. [1] These rates are negotiated with the federal government, and so theoretically reflect the actual costs pretty well. It’s not obvious how well they translate to a K-12 environment: researchers need more specialized services…but also are a lot less likely to draw on the walls.
  - hotpotamus 4y ago
    I did use the word revenue in scare quotes for a reason - I don't expect that all that money could be given directly to the teacher. On the other hand, the state should be able to achieve quite high economies of scale on administration and purchasing (whether they actually do is something else), and there's no profit to make at the end of the day. I was actually thinking 50% would make the math easy but probably be a bit unrealistic, but I arrive at about the same place as you I think. Also I'd imagine that most classes are larger than 20, but hopefully smaller than 30.
GiorgioG 4y ago
By the standard that we're systematically mismanaging the funds we are spending. The bussing system is absurdly inefficient and wholly unnecessary. Neighborhood schools used to be a thing. Some school systems offer 'gold plated' healthcare plans where they include cosmetic surgery as a benefit to a school system that needs more money spent towards actual education. I'm not advocating doing away with the public education system, but we're being swindled. It's not the teachers' fault (obviously), but the system as a whole. Every little town has its own school system, administrative overhead, etc.
- mattkrause 4y ago
  > Some school systems offer 'gold plated' healthcare plans So? If you want good teachers--or at, some point, any teachers--you need to offer working conditions that are good enough to attract them, just like any other job. Spending on benefits "instead of" education is a false dichotomy; in fact, I'd say that's the central thesis of the article.
  - GiorgioG 4y ago
    This was the school system I went to in a rust-belt city, the teachers were not 'good' on average.
    - mattkrause 4y ago
      But if you tried to hire teachers while offering less, would they have been better? My guess is no; they'd have been even worse.
Beltalowda 4y ago
The figure in the Netherlands is about €6.7k for an elementary school pupil (until age ~12, not sure how that compares to K-12 exactly). So that's a little over half of what the US spends, and I think it's fair to say that Dutch elementary education is at least roughly comparable to US education (maybe one is a little bit better than the other, but I'd be surprised if the US one was twice as good). I don't know about other countries, but this is one metric to give an approximation about what is "plenty", although there's the caveat that you can't compare this directly: I've heard about "school lunches" and "school nurses" in the US, and those kind of things are virtually unheard of over here.
- kevingadd 4y ago
  Yeah, we spend money to operate school police departments here too. I totally believe you that the Netherlands' spending is adequate given costs and services, though. I assume you don't have private health insurance plans in the Netherlands either? Those will raise the cost per teacher in the US.

SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago

I don’t think it’s fair to assume the money is evenly split. Public schooling must also support students who need much more support, ranging from ESL to a variety of disabilities with a variety of severity. If you think of specialized needs students the 13k number looks ridiculous. 13k is an alarmingly low amount of support for dyslexia, or autism, or diabetes.

nyokodo 4y ago
> If you think of specialized needs students the 13k number looks ridiculous. You’re comparing an average per student spend to a high needs minority. Average spend should be compared to the average student who does not have dyslexia etc. A larger than average portion will be spent on kids with special needs due to special facilities, smaller class sizes, and specialist teachers etc.
- Wowfunhappy 4y ago
  But I think the $13K number includes those outliers, no? If I understand GP, they're arguing the average for 90% of students is probably significantly lower.

Wowfunhappy 4y ago

I'd argue $13K per student is quite low relative to the services expected. I mean, compare that to the price of college tuition. Now, college is too expensive and I certainly wouldn't want to replicate that problem in K-12 schools. But... well, in some ways colleges have it easier, because the students are older and can be expected to be more independent. You can't have a 100-person lecture in a K-12 setting (not that I love classes like that at the college level either).

lr4444lr 4y ago
Fine, compare it to portion of GDP. Like healthcare, we spend a lot and get poor return if you measure objectively by things like standardized tests, unemployment, imprisonment, etc.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
mattkrause 4y ago
Yup. $13k/year works out to about $10 per pupil-hour, and even less once you include costs like the building and work done out-of-hours (grading, lesson planning). I’m pretty sure I made something like that babysitting in junior high!
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- prirun 4y ago
  "Pupil-hour" makes no sense in a classroom environment. When you were babysitting, they didn't pay you $10/hr per kid.
  - mattkrause 4y ago
    Many people did, actually. The amount of work/responsibility definitely scales with the number of kids, and it's not exactly linear either: one will color quietly, two might play together--or fight, and three or more...yikes. I mentioned the rate because it surprised me it was so close. I'd expect that it costs more to actually educate a kid, and of course, the parents provided the house (and often ice cream and HBO), whereas that rate includes everything.

horsawlarway 4y ago

I'm not actually sure that's "plenty". For comparison - we currently pay more per year to keep our 1 year old child in daycare (roughly ~15,000/yr) and for daycare we literally only expect them to keep him alive & clean. And this is considered a "cheap" daycare. Most places in our area (the much cheaper south-west side of Atlanta) still charge more than 1600/m or almost 20k/yr. We certainly don't expect them to be significantly enriching his education experience (although the simple exposure to other kids will likely do that at this age). We also don't expect the employees to have any sort of educational/vocational training to excel at teaching, or expect them to perform any sort of off-the-clock work (ex: grading, class prep, parent-teacher meetings, etc). I expect them to be mostly high-school graduates with a background check. So I look at that number, and while it's certainly a large number if you're making 1 teacher manage 30 kids, I don't really know that it's a number that results in viable conditions to truly "educate" children. I strongly suspect that education is highly dependent on the family at home, and that's becoming harder to meaningful do as more and more families are forced to have both parents work full time.

millzlane 4y ago
>I strongly suspect that education is highly dependent on the family at home, and that's becoming harder to meaningful do as more and more families are forced to have both parents work full time. This is a big part of it. Education doesn't stop when the school bell rings.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- notch656a 4y ago
  But I was told by HN the state is responsible for providing an education for children. If the parent is responsible instead, then I'd like to be able to opt out of paying taxes for schools and instead send my kid to a private school.
lotsofpulp 4y ago
>For comparison - we currently pay more per year to keep our 1 year old child in daycare (roughly ~15,000/yr) and for daycare we literally only expect them to keep him alive & clean You cannot compare the per child costs of taking care of a kid who cannot go to the toilet themselves or eat by themself with a kid who is much more self sufficient. The person taking care of a baby (or 4 babies) might need to be much less qualified than an AP physics teacher in high school, but the labor (and liability) costs do not necessarily scale exactly with the minimum qualifications needed to be an AP physics teacher versus a daycare teacher.

_hcuq 4y ago

And yet a teacher with 30 kids in the class gets maybe 80k in a better paying state. 30 x 13k is $390k…. Something isn’t adding up. What are all the overheads?

GiorgioG 4y ago
Every rinky dink town has their own school system, superintendent, administrative overhead…