The US spends twice what we spent in 1970 on education per student, in constant dollars. I don't know how to make the schools better, but money sure didn't do it.
And we're going broke paying for health care. I don't know how much more we spend, but it's multiples.
you're a decade too early. Compare it to 1980 and you see how it flattens out very quickly. Compare it to 1990 and you see the cost per student has basically flatlined. Spending diverted from government funding of schools to student loans, so even that's misleading.
>And we're going broke paying for health care.
Signing a bill giving trillions to billionaires certainly does make it hard to fund healthcare. Especially when the wealth concentration these days has the top 10% making 50% of the money. I wonder how we solve that...
A decade too early for what? Sure, it flattens out, but the fact remains we're spending a whole lot more money on schools than we did when the students were objectively learning more.
And what bill was it that gave trillions to billionaires?
We have an enormous K-12 administration level partly because we have so many local school districts, each of which typically needs to separately buy textbooks, serve food, apply for state and federal funding and handle compliance, run HR and physical plant operations and janitorial and IT, manage transportation, respond to inquiries from the public, etc.
It’s very hard politically to merge school districts because even beyond labor considerations, people have a sense that their district is superior to the one next door and think a merger will create immediate chaos and long term harm to their kids’ educations and their property values.
Spending isn't the problem, when you ignore how the spending is composed.
We flattened out decades ago, and that's because we went from subsidizing schools to funding loans. The money makeup per studnet won't look different... until the student graduates and can't pay it off.
So our solution was obvious: make it so they can't bankrupt and stay in debt forever. Great way to build an educated citizenship.
