Lies, damned lies and public school spending

From a classic analysis, "the true cost of public education."

So this week, a letter to the editor at the Wall Street Journal repeats a long-disproved claim that not only are most public schools are underfunded, most public schools don't spend very much per student and better-funded schools produce better results. Here's the letter.

The letter, opposing public funds for vouchers, garnered a lot of responses, about 96% of which were critical of the author's data, logic and analysis, i.e., his rhetoric. Rather than show them all, here are three of the more cogent responses.

Which brings me back to "the true cost of public education," an invaluable, three-minute 2010 video that exposed the gross misrepresentation of public school spending by its supporters. In brief, the schools and supporters claim "per student costs" based NOT on the actual spending by the school district, but seemingly on the amount of money that "goes into the classroom," meaning that things like supplies, building construction, utilities and maintenance, healthcare and retirement costs, and even items like paper are left out of the equation. For the curious, watch the short video.

Below are two vivid examples from the video of some of the discrepancies in reporting. And if these numbers are not shocking enough, recall that they are at least twelve years old.

Look at Los Angeles, twelve years ago (above), and in 2022. Total spending by the school district is $24 billion. They have 640,000 students. [I write "have" rather than "teach" in the absence of evidence that all of the teachers teach and all of the students learn. As one respondent noted above, earning all A's in math at a "top" public school did not provide enough to pass the math entry test at the next level.]

You may shudder to do the math, so I will: $24,000,000,000 divided by 640,000 equals $37,500 spent per pupil in the system. Per the chart above, this is up from $10,053 "claimed" [$25,208 "real"] twelve years ago in the video. Yet, even then, school officials claim that this is not enough, as noted here:

The problem? Here is the administrative analysis:

Basically, the "hidden" costs of employee raises, healthcare and pensions does not seem to garner much attention in the critical analysis of the costs of education, primarily because progressive politicians have bought off teachers by "kicking the can down the road" when they negotiate teacher union contracts, publicly claiming that the pols are "tough" on salaries while not acknowledging the billions of dollars of non-salary personnel costs. The pols leave the problems to the next generation.