Wasting Money on K-12 Education

We've heard it all before: our nation's public schools are under-funded.  But a new paper by Adam B. Schaeffer, Ph.D., a policy analyst with the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom, challenges this too-widely held belief.  Schaeffer asserts: we aren't spending too little, we are wasting too much.

How much does it cost to educate one student for an entire school year?  Liberally, most of us would guess a few thousand dollars.  There's the teacher's salary ($47,000 on average), overhead costs (the school building, electricity, maintenance), support staff and administrators.  Shockingly, Schaeffer reports that over $13,000 was spent in the state of Virginia to educate one child for the school year.  Virginia is not alone.  K-12 public education is the largest budget line in state and local governments, often amounting to more than 33% of the overall spending for a fiscal year, but most of us (including our politicians) have little idea as to how much we're actually spending.  $13,000 is no small number.  Multiply that by the hundreds (sometimes thousands) of students in each school district and we begin to realize that taxpayers spend about $600 billion per year on public education. In fact, Schaeffer writes that 27 cents of every dollar collected through taxes at the state or local level is directed towards public education.

Once we've established that funding education is the single biggest strain on budgeting, and once a strong number of citizens understand this, the task becomes in finding solutions to curtail spending while improving the efficacy and efficiency in delivery of education.  Unfortunately, many school districts are not forthright with the data public officials need to effectively monitor and control spending.  Without a solid understanding of spending in K-12 schools, it will continue to be difficult to ascertain whether the astronomical amount we spend per student every year is cost-effective or if we need to cut expenses and stop wasting money.  Kudos, Mr. Schaeffer for getting this conversation started.

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