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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.