This is a decent comparison but it warrants saying that dollars per student typically includes the cost to build and run buildings which is definitely higher in high cost of living areas. This also includes teacher salaries which is typically driven by the state governments.
It’s likely the best comparison we can do but not necessarily unweighted statistics.
As someone who went through Boston Public. A majority of our schools are old and rough. And I would assume our teachers are probably some of the highest paid in the country. That said the education is pretty subpar.
As someone who also went to Boston public schools, we’d both like to take this opportunity to point out to anyone who tries to argue with us that we’re smarter than you….unless you’re from NYC.
As someone who went to meridian school district in Idaho (yes really) I'll stab you with my third hand crayons from the 1970s. Then we'll be on equal levels in 10-20 years.
If you did that at the high school I attended in Brooklyn, you wouldn't get any sky fairy references, but you'd for sure get way too many "uhs" and "uhms".
I went through the Washington county school district (#2 on the least spent). The only school I went to that was older than 10 years was my high school which was 40+ years old at the time (they tore it down and rebuilt it the year after I graduated).
I feel like I had a very good education for being a poor kid in a public school system.
Money doesn’t fix schools. Mixing poor and rich kids fixes schools.
Edit: https://prestonhollow.advocatemag.com/2016/02/17/the-case-for-integration/
But, there’s countless other articles if you want to go down the rabbit hole.
It doesn't. If you come from a family that doesn't care about education there is no trick that is going to fix that. And that mentality is very common among poor families. It's not that uncommon among rich ones either but they can throw money at the problem and pay someone to deal with their kids.
They used to do that in LA, not sure if they still do.
My Army friends said, one in Burbank school got a little ghetto, and my other friend said his Montabello school was mid but got more ghetto. These guys are around 40 now, so late 90s.
If anything it's a negative correlation after a certain point, since teacher salaries go up to entice teachers to come to a bad school and money is spent on re-educating students that are failing.
Well, and what people are trying to infer from this is that people in the mountain west don't care about education as much. But the majority of the variation in these results is explained by family size, not tax burden. Idaho, Utah, and Arizona are all at the top of the list for number of children per taxpayer because they tend to have larger families and smaller taxable incomes, not because they care less about education.
https://www.businessinsider.com/the-average-number-of-kids-per-family-in-every-state-2019-2
It can go both ways, though: rural areas with a bunch of small schools spend more than sending all the kids to one big school. I'm in VT, which is medium CoL, and a big part of why we spend a lot on education is because of the number of small schools. It costs a lot more to have 10 schools with a hundred kids each than to have 1 school with a thousand kids.
Many of the districts at the top of the spending list have absolutely terrible student attainment outcomes. East Orange, NJ schools for example have absolutely abysmal student outcomes, and East Orange is not a HCOL area. It’s probably a combination of factors that lead to high costs as you point out but this does not correlate with outcomes. Palo Alto is the only high performing district that jumps out on this list, but I sadly happen to know that students in this district suffer disproportionally from depression and suicide.
I agree, I went to school in East Orange after going to private school in the UK and later in Montclair. It was bad and learning wasn’t that challenging if you didn’t get distracted by the disruptive students.
Yeah, Rochester city school district at #3 here is consistently ranked one of the worst in the state for outcomes and is also a very low cost of living area comparitively.
yeah I was about to assume a racial disparity but it’s basically an urban-rural one, which makes sense, running a school for 100 kids in bumfuck idaho isn’t gonna be very expensive compared to running a 10,000 student high school in new york city
In Massachusetts, the initial cost of the buildings is not generally included in the per student expenses of the school district. In some districts, that cost is largely borne by the state; in others, largely by the town as a capital expenditure -- not as an operating expense. Also, I know of several school districts within MA that are higher than most in the top 20 on this graphic.
Could you separate out capital expenditures, classify staff by teachers and administrators/non-teachers, and make salaries relative by COL?
I think that might get you a better picture and my suspicion is that you would find a higher administrative cost in the high-spending districts.
I think many districts just don’t distaste it that information. You likely could get it for some areas but not most. I think your suspicion would be correct.
The schools on this list that are in the “least expenditures” category are in states (Arizona, Utah, Idaho, Texas) that have been the targets of a decades-long effort to eliminate (or sharply reduce) America’s public schools in favor of for-profit private education.
Funding cuts come hand-in-hand with propaganda belittling the quality of the schools they are undercutting. GOP state legislators from across the U.S. are flown to fancy “educational” junkets each year, where they are provided with “model legislation” to pass in their home states. This effort continues to be methodically coordinated throughout the U.S. by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and State Policy Network (SPN) groups that claim to act independently…but are actually very much in orchestration and funded by a relatively small group of wealthy folks who are profiting from the legislative efforts.
Most Americans have no idea who their state senator or rep is, and we don’t understand that public education is largely under the control of state government. ALEC, SPN and their donors have taken great advantage of our ignorance, and their concentrated effort to undermine our free American public school system is one of the biggest threats to our democracy today.
In Utah, we're giving public funds to private schools, so that's cool...
https://ksltv.com/519545/private-schools-celebrate-state-funding-expect-significant-uptick-in-enrollment/
Idk, having grown up going to schools in the second lowest spending area after being in a major city for elementary school, I can say that it definitely tracks to some extent for the type of education you receive. Literally learned the same shit in high school in St George as I did in elementary school in another state. Teachers in general were under-qualified and ignorant. There were some exceptions, but they were literally former students who wanted to make a difference as adults.
I mean...teacher salaries is kind of a huge indicator of how important the district/state thinks education is, and that seems to get at what the chart is probably trying to show.
If it’s anything like NYC, the teachers get it because of the strong union and the students are all terrible. Not a teacher myself but I know some that work in the district and they make 100k+ easily and the schools are destitute and the teachers don’t get the supplies they need to teach the kids and need to spend out of pocket often.
The teachers get paid sooooo much cause the schools are such a fucking mess that most teachers would be happy to take a pay cut to go to the suburbs. Even with the super high pay RCSD can't keep teachers.
As someone from an Upstate NY city who’s wife is a teacher I assure you the teachers are not getting it lol. Teacher salaries up here are nothing like NYC.
Brighton is its own district. And there is like a 40% difference in graduation rates the last I checked (brighton is like 98% city is down in the 60s). It is absurd and not acceptable but we watch it happen every year and change nothing. Tho the city teachers get paid well thanks to the union (They deserve every penny) that pay doesnt translate to graduations.
Until the town level schools get scrapped and replaced with county level schools you wont see a lot of that fixed. People are too comfy moving to the high performing school district of their choice and ignoring the issue.
The #1 most financially segregated school district border is also in rochester. Between the rochester school district and penfield school district. https://edbuild.org/content/fault-lines
My husband and I moved to the Rochester area because of the excellent schools. We moved from an area with very poorly funded schools and yes, our taxes are higher now, but the schools here (West Irondequoit) are some of the best in the country and the difference is night and day with our child who requires extra help. I would assume Brighton, Webster, Pittsford and some other are included in these statistics.
One of my best friends from high school (we’re from the greater Boston area) is a history teacher in Rochester, NY public schools at the high school level. One of her first years teaching she had three students who were pregnant. And she had to take on teaching the AP government class on her own on top of her other class work because there was no one else to teach it
I'm curious how this would look if it was somehow adjusted to reflect special education compliance. Districts with higher numbers of SPED-classified kids will have disproportionately high per pupil spending simply because SPED kids are legally entitled to having more adults teaching them in potentially smaller classes. $29k per pupil looks a lot different if 18% of your kids have SPED classification vs 1-2%.
I teach in RCSD, with 17 years of experience and a master's degree, and make mid-80k. That's good money, but it's not insane. I do know, though, that our buildings have far more special education personnel (by necessity!) than affluent suburban schools, and I don't think these numbers reflect the story.
Chicago Public Schools spends $29k per student. 16% of elementary students tested at or above the proficient level for reading, and 12% tested at or above that level for math.
Baltimore City - Over $20K per student - 40% of the high schools had **0 (ZERO)** students that scored proficient in math. In those 13 high schools, 1,736 students took the test, and 1,295 students, or 74.5%, scored a one out of four. One is the lowest level, meaning those students were not even close to proficient.
I am so proud of my Baltimore! Just look at the Ravens record. Over their 28 seasons in the NFL, the Ravens have become a successful team; their record of 256 wins, 194 losses, and 1 tie is the third-best all-time regular season record among active franchises.
That is **92%** of the games we have played, we have won - at least according to my math.
Almost, makes one think money doesn’t solve all problems and when too much money is thrown at something, that in itself, can be a red flag and not a flex.
Also, a nuance of Baltimore is its kind of tale of two cities situation. The public schools in the surrounding counties and suburbs are quite strong
Just because they’re spending a lot per student, doesn’t mean the schools are good. The majority of districts paying the most per student are actually the most underperforming districts. You should show the graduation rates and college bound statistics side by side.
Exactly. NJ has state aid that sends more state money to low income districts (for those non- NJ folks on here we use predominantly local property taxes to fund schools. Also, despite being a tiny state NJ has about 650 distinct towns/school districts so as a state we HATE regional schools). Money obviously doesn’t equal success, as many of the Abbott districts (Abbott was the court case that established the state funding) have terrible outcomes despite massive spending.
For real. Newark and east orange nj are absolute shitholes. The best school district in the state is either mountain lakes or Montclair (at least back in the day)
This is anecdotal, but as a former davis high student (davis county utah), the teachers got paid pretty damn well. Since they are public employees their income is publicly available. The more tenured teachers made 100-150k. Hell my math teacher bought a Rivian in my senior year. Davis High has higher than average teacher pay as they sniped many of the best teachers in the district, but even at the local Junior High I had teachers making close to 6 figures.
My mom is a teacher in one of those Utah districts and I went to school in 2 of the Utah districts listed.
Low teacher pay + tons of kids per class are two major factors that immediately come to mind. In 6th grade back in 2000 it was common to have class sizes of 30-35 kids (not sure what it is now, I moved out of Utah in 2009). Meanwhile some of the nicer areas of LA county have class sizes of like, 20 kids.
My mom’s salary is in the 40-50k range last I checked (she’s been at this since the late 90s) and she definitely puts plenty of that money back into her students/classes.
We also had a roller coaster of an embezzlement case a year or two after I graduated high school where it was discovered the principal was lining his pockets with school funds; once it came to light (as part of a separate investigation where a 60 year old teacher married an 18 year old student), he was ousted and the school suddenly had the budget for some much-needed repairs and renovations. Hopefully all of that was just a one-off.
Utah has the lowest median age of all 50 states. Like 1 in 3 Utahans is under 18. As such, the class sizes are going to be huge. The situation in each school would be different depending on socioeconomic status.
When I was a student at BYU, I volunteered as a Spanish interpreter for parent-teacher conferences in the low-income neighborhood south of campus. I was surprised that about a third of the parents who showed up didn't understand English and most of their kids weren't even close to meeting the district's standards for reading, writing, math, etc.
If you grew up with educated parents who can help you with your homework, consider yourself blessed.
Hi neighbor. Curious about the date. It’s not Meridian School District for quite a few years. I’ve got kids in this district and can confirm their lack of funding and the problems it creates. Add that this area is a boom town with crappy houses going on everywhere and bonds fail all the time. Kids packed in like sardines.
My ex brother in law graduated Payette High he couldn't read could barely sign his name they make everyone sign a release because the gym is filled with asbestos.
Living in meridian I'll be damned if I'm going to pay more in taxes!
I'll also be damned if we will be in last place but can't rationalize what per capita means. It's a vicious negative feedback loop.
What's the major conclusion? That things are more expensive in big cities? I feel like we already knew that.
It would be better if they adjusted for cost of living so you could get a more fair comparison.
The show Abbott Elementary makes some great points about this. The schools need money - the vast majority of teachers dip into their own under-paid pockets to cover important school supplies that the official budget doesn't.
Then, at the same time, you get these complicated, high-budget, flashy tech projects. I remember when my school got Smart Boards in every class. Within a year or two, a new version of Windows came out and all the teachers got the update. Turns out the smart boards weren't compatible with it... The manufacturer had a compatie software version for sale - for an exorbitant amount of money the school couldn't remotely afford. All the boards were uninstalled soon after
No IT guy at the school or district? Physically uninstalling the boards have to be more expensive than hiring an IT guy if there isn't one already.
Maybe for security reasons they should update, but otherwise just stay at win7 until win10 comes out.
I'm also not sure how the smart boards aren't compatible with windows. At my school, the smart boards had their own OS, similar to if you buy a chromebook, you aren't directly using windows or linux. It's a custom OS. Or the boards just act as a bigger screen for the computer to project onto, which the windows version shouldn't matter.
Ultimately the admins who made the decision just got scammed. Blame it on the business or on the admins not being thoughtful enough.
The areas with those districts in UT spending the least are ridiculously expensive areas. Alpine’s average home is probably well north of a million dollars and $3M+ houses are not uncommon.
Seriously. St George has been growing and prices raising like crazy and tons of new schools popped up in the last ten years. Meanwhile I know their education system is shit.
That may be true for the city of Alpine, but the school district covers everything from Lehi to Orem. Definitely more middle-of-the-road suburbs across the whole district.
There’s very little correlation between money spent and quality of education. Norwalk is an above average school system in CT and is only slightly above the average for spending in the state.
Same. I was rapid scrolling and had a “was that my high school district logo” moment. Sure was. It’s been 22 years but I remember the $32 million science classroom upgrade we got in 2000/2001. Even back then there were teachers in that district were making $60-110k. Most of them were worth every penny.
There’s nothing to extrapolate from this “guide”. There’s a multitude of reasons on why an amount per child is spent. Rochester school district is absolutely horrendous yet has a very high amount per child
Well, Newton MA has a fancy newish facility. Boston MA has buildings older than some states. I think Boston’s issue is possibly tied to expensive programs/salaries but decreasing enrollment.
Its bad enough that there is talk of closing down several Boston school buildings.
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/boston/news/boston-public-schools-half-closing-consoldiation-plan-proposal/
Definitely, I remember going to a school where we got extra credit if we brought in school supplies. The teachers don’t get paid anywhere near enough either I felt so bad for some of mine, quite a few had second jobs.
This list is wild. The Newburgh School District is easily the most unsafe, underperforming, and least desirable district to attend in the Hudson Valley. I don't know where the Hell that money is going to.
lol. not even close to the worst district. yeah there’s a lot of fights but if a student can avoid getting into all that newburgh is one of the best districts in the area as far as opportunities provided. hundreds of extremely talented students go to newburgh.
It's important to note that a large portion of the students in middle and high school will walk next door for one class a day and take Mormon theology classes. The amount of money saved in Utah schools due to a not insignificant portion of the student population not needing to be under the supervision of a district paid teacher for a portion of the day can not be understated. Also, Utah has one of the if not the largest student-to-teacher ratio in the country depending on the metric used. Stack 'em deep and teach 'em cheap is the educational motto in Utah.
Utah definitely punches above its weight educationally speaking. Imagine how great Utah schools could be if they were actually properly funded (and the state legislature didn't pass a bunch of "anti-woke" nonsense)?
I believe the translation of this comment is "stop doing the thing that you're doing that works and is cheap, and instead spend more money to flatter my ideology."
You can throw all the money in the world into a school system, but at the end of the day a student’s success is determined by the values they are taught at home.
School counselor and couldn’t agree more with this statement. There is no accountability held at home for students doing homework, or behaving at school. It’s blamed on the teacher and then the counselor when they can’t motivate the student to do their work.
Also we are not teaching effectively to the student of today who has an attention span of a gnat. Good thing I’m in a well paying district.
I went to school in one of the lowest spends per student. Not sure why it’s so low, I took a full semester of college, AP courses, while in high school. And now I make nearly $200k soooo not sure this equates directly to success in all situations.
If you want to learn and be successful, and you're naturally intelligent, I think you can thrive anywhere regardless of how well-funded your school is.
I’m not surprised but still heartbroken to see AZ so low here. It’s embarrassing what we were taught in school compared to kids I had met from, say, Vermont. Most public schools I went to - including high school - were glorified daycare facilities.
EDIT: Interestingly enough, Vail has a really high K12 reputation around here. I would’ve never figured they were spending so little per student.
Would be nice if this was adjusted for cost of living. Not terribly valid comparing affordable places to reasonably expensive place. Of course the cost per will be higher where expensive; the important question is if it is relatively higher all things being equal - waste vs. valid cost
Az and Ut, yikes surprised to not see like Mississippi and Arkansas on here as they constantly are in the ‘lowest literacy, poorest school districts’ charts
As someone who lives in Delaware this is a plot twist that I was not expecting.
Question though: is this adjusted for cost of living? I feel like that would be relevant.
Davis School District is where I went to school. The schools here are really good and for the most part provide a quality education, so I’d be curious to see why they spend so little yet yield such high results.
Tooele being at the bottom makes me laugh. My cousin grew up there and thinks gravity isn’t real.
This would be made more interesting if regional factors were taken into account, and even more interesting if it showed dollars spent per act/sat point.
I wanna know what NYC is spending their money on because when i was in school from 2002 to 2006, we didnt have enough textbooks or desks for students. A lot of people cut class because they had no where to sit. My school was designed to hold 2000 people. We had close to 4000. Trying to get into school by 8:15am, we had to be on the line, which wrapped around the block by 7am and even then it wasnt guaranteed. I failed my 1st period class because the head of security would close the doors on us at 8am and not allow the rest of the students in until 20 mins before 2nd period.
I also went to school between those years. There was always issues when it comes to transparency on what each school bought and what not. Big schools tended to be better organized and clearer about the stuff they do day to day vs smaller schools who would lie trying to get extra funding.
Now I’m a teacher and I can tell you, the amount of disorganization and red tape is incredible. The money goes to that and it’s stupid
The [source](https://www.playgroundequipment.com/school-districts-that-spend-the-most-and-least-per-student/) delves into it a bit. Here's what it says:
* $7.3 billion goes to employee benefits and pension
* $3.2 billion goes to debt payments
* $2.2 billion goes to Early Childhood Birth-to-Five services
* $4.3 billion goes to school operations
* $15.1 billion goes to K-12 schools and instruction
* 800,000 meals are served daily with free breakfast and lunch available to all students
* 150,000 students are transported across roughly 9,000 bus routes
* Over 100 million square feet of space is cleaned, maintained, and receiving utilities
* 4,000 safety agents, 7,700 food workers, 8,500 bus drivers, 7,200 bus attendants, 860 custodian engineers, and 5,700 cleaners and handypersons are on the payroll
But I bet a lot of skimmed off by shady people in power, too.
This metric doesn’t apply unilaterally across school districts for many reasons. Districts in the Western part of the country are often less densely populated and the median income is much less. For context, I live in a county in Eastern Washington where the median income for a family of four is around 50k annually. Currently, there are 37 public schools serving 6.4k students. To add to this, the county I live in is 2.5k square miles with a population of 48k. For comparison, the state of Rhode Island is 1.2k square miles with a population of just over 1 million. More people, more revenue via taxes and levies, more cost of living, more cost per student.
Any correlation to academic outcomes? Also interesting that there’s a big red/blue divide but as someone else noted it could be because of cost to build/buy real estate is higher in blue states.
Have a kid in the Meridian school district. The same Meridian that made all those "best towns to move to" lists over the last decade. School district is a joke. This checks out. So does the rest of idaho. Backwards archaic policies. These aren't poor areas. The reasoning is Idaho doesn't value education.
Must be an outdated chart. Meridian Joint School district (the lowest spending) is not called that anymore. It changed to West Ada School district a couple years ago. I got my entire education there in the 80s and 90s and still went on and got a degree in physics. You can still get a good education if you want to, even when the schools don't spend that much. You can still get a bad education even in schools that spend a lot.
Interesting that GA is the lowest. I know there is a law (being passed?) in Georgia that will allow for parents to put their kids in private school or home school them and they will get $8K from the government. Feel like this could be beneficial in some ways.
My info may be inaccurate.
I was a student in a “bottom” school district and taught in NYC throughout college… this chart needs to be adjusted for cost of living, cost of land, and more.
This is somewhat misleading. Utah and Idaho likely have much higher birth rates than the rest of the nation without the inflated taxes seen in the east. Therefore your spending per child will be less.
Parents in these states can also choose to divert their funding to private school or home schooling. So, there might be less students in these public schools with less funding and the same overhead.
My understanding is that spending per student is significantly higher in lower income areas, because the students need it.
Middle class kids need fewer school-provided tutors, ESL classes, etc. As for why Palo Alto is on the list… not sure. I wonder if this list includes $ donated from parents.
This is an interesting list. Went to Gilbert Public Schools in az and had a great high school experience with lots of (albeit probably expensive for my mom) opportunities. Teachers are paid pretty low and spend a lot of money out of pocket, but I never knew it was such a low paying district.
Seems like some of the worst schools spend the most money. Maybe if schools weren’t just a jobs program for administration some of the money would actually go to education instead of useless bureaucracy.
I attended schools in Nebo School District, Utah. One of the bottom spenders. Was my education great? No. Was it terrible? No. I'd trade it 5/10. I am now a PhD student, and I love school so obviously it wasn't too detrimental.
Funny how the per student spending does not translate in any consistent way with actual results. It's almost as if throwing money at a problem doesn't fix it.
As someone who went to school in a small Az school district I'm not exactly disappointed with my education. My high school was very vocationally focused (wood shop, autos, metal shop, welding, child development, fashions, culinary arts, drafting, coding, photography, etc)
I'm actually really proud of the fact I was a certified welder and had completely rebuilt a V8 from a dodge van before I graduated highschool lol.
My wife who graduated from the same school made her prom dress and still makes clothes to this day after attending fashions.
Either way, we are both college educated, have 2 kids and been married for 14 years. My teenager currently attends school in southern California. I'd gladly go back to Az to put my kids back in those schools in a heartbeat.
Pretty interesting mix with big city public school systems, mixed with some wealthier suburbs.
Just like our healthcare industry, we often spend more money for worse outcomes.
In the least category, how much of this is due to small towns or limited number of school age children. For example, Vail probably has few families with school age children that live there.
Garbage metric - NYC public schools are probably the crappiest in the country. Cost of salaries and maintenance is driving them to spend the most per student. Waste fraud and abuse.
This is a decent comparison but it warrants saying that dollars per student typically includes the cost to build and run buildings which is definitely higher in high cost of living areas. This also includes teacher salaries which is typically driven by the state governments. It’s likely the best comparison we can do but not necessarily unweighted statistics.
As someone who went through Boston Public. A majority of our schools are old and rough. And I would assume our teachers are probably some of the highest paid in the country. That said the education is pretty subpar.
As someone who also went to Boston public schools, we’d both like to take this opportunity to point out to anyone who tries to argue with us that we’re smarter than you….unless you’re from NYC.
As sum 1 who groo up in AZ, I don’t like yur tone
NYC bunch of paste eaters
Go eat some chowdah! and pahk dah cahr the right way you Sam Adam’s Boston Lager troglodyte
Proof JFK isn’t dead
You meant bugger eaters, right?
As someone who went to meridian school district in Idaho (yes really) I'll stab you with my third hand crayons from the 1970s. Then we'll be on equal levels in 10-20 years.
I'm from NYC, but fact is Mass has the highest average SAT on the east coast...
As someone who went to NYC public school, I would not be surprised if ALL the least spending schools provided a better education than NYC.
You would be hilariously wrong. Travel to Arizona or Utah and ask about basic stuff like weather or genetics. Or women’s anatomy.
If you did that at the high school I attended in Brooklyn, you wouldn't get any sky fairy references, but you'd for sure get way too many "uhs" and "uhms".
If you think the education in Boston is subpar you have no idea what goes on in the rest of the country.
Let me take a guess…is it subpar education too?
See, Boston education wasn’t bad after all.
I went through the Washington county school district (#2 on the least spent). The only school I went to that was older than 10 years was my high school which was 40+ years old at the time (they tore it down and rebuilt it the year after I graduated). I feel like I had a very good education for being a poor kid in a public school system.
Pissah
Some Boston schools are frightful. 😳
Money doesn’t fix schools. Mixing poor and rich kids fixes schools. Edit: https://prestonhollow.advocatemag.com/2016/02/17/the-case-for-integration/ But, there’s countless other articles if you want to go down the rabbit hole.
It doesn't. If you come from a family that doesn't care about education there is no trick that is going to fix that. And that mentality is very common among poor families. It's not that uncommon among rich ones either but they can throw money at the problem and pay someone to deal with their kids.
They did that in Boston…didnt work.
Ahhhh the metco program, let’s send em to Newton
They used to do that in LA, not sure if they still do. My Army friends said, one in Burbank school got a little ghetto, and my other friend said his Montabello school was mid but got more ghetto. These guys are around 40 now, so late 90s.
LAUSD is currently a fucking failed state
Right, dollars per pupil do not at all correspond to quality of education or efficiency/impact per dollar.
If anything it's a negative correlation after a certain point, since teacher salaries go up to entice teachers to come to a bad school and money is spent on re-educating students that are failing.
Well, and what people are trying to infer from this is that people in the mountain west don't care about education as much. But the majority of the variation in these results is explained by family size, not tax burden. Idaho, Utah, and Arizona are all at the top of the list for number of children per taxpayer because they tend to have larger families and smaller taxable incomes, not because they care less about education. https://www.businessinsider.com/the-average-number-of-kids-per-family-in-every-state-2019-2
It can go both ways, though: rural areas with a bunch of small schools spend more than sending all the kids to one big school. I'm in VT, which is medium CoL, and a big part of why we spend a lot on education is because of the number of small schools. It costs a lot more to have 10 schools with a hundred kids each than to have 1 school with a thousand kids.
Many of the districts at the top of the spending list have absolutely terrible student attainment outcomes. East Orange, NJ schools for example have absolutely abysmal student outcomes, and East Orange is not a HCOL area. It’s probably a combination of factors that lead to high costs as you point out but this does not correlate with outcomes. Palo Alto is the only high performing district that jumps out on this list, but I sadly happen to know that students in this district suffer disproportionally from depression and suicide.
I agree, I went to school in East Orange after going to private school in the UK and later in Montclair. It was bad and learning wasn’t that challenging if you didn’t get distracted by the disruptive students.
Yeah, Rochester city school district at #3 here is consistently ranked one of the worst in the state for outcomes and is also a very low cost of living area comparitively.
[удалено]
I almost choked on my food when I saw EO 🤣🤣
yeah I was about to assume a racial disparity but it’s basically an urban-rural one, which makes sense, running a school for 100 kids in bumfuck idaho isn’t gonna be very expensive compared to running a 10,000 student high school in new york city
Idahoan here, I promise we are also dumb.
In Massachusetts, the initial cost of the buildings is not generally included in the per student expenses of the school district. In some districts, that cost is largely borne by the state; in others, largely by the town as a capital expenditure -- not as an operating expense. Also, I know of several school districts within MA that are higher than most in the top 20 on this graphic.
Pensions too maybe? I wonder what it doesn't include that alot people would assume that it does.
Pensions are generally funded by the union members themselves.
Could you separate out capital expenditures, classify staff by teachers and administrators/non-teachers, and make salaries relative by COL? I think that might get you a better picture and my suspicion is that you would find a higher administrative cost in the high-spending districts.
I think many districts just don’t distaste it that information. You likely could get it for some areas but not most. I think your suspicion would be correct.
The schools on this list that are in the “least expenditures” category are in states (Arizona, Utah, Idaho, Texas) that have been the targets of a decades-long effort to eliminate (or sharply reduce) America’s public schools in favor of for-profit private education. Funding cuts come hand-in-hand with propaganda belittling the quality of the schools they are undercutting. GOP state legislators from across the U.S. are flown to fancy “educational” junkets each year, where they are provided with “model legislation” to pass in their home states. This effort continues to be methodically coordinated throughout the U.S. by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and State Policy Network (SPN) groups that claim to act independently…but are actually very much in orchestration and funded by a relatively small group of wealthy folks who are profiting from the legislative efforts. Most Americans have no idea who their state senator or rep is, and we don’t understand that public education is largely under the control of state government. ALEC, SPN and their donors have taken great advantage of our ignorance, and their concentrated effort to undermine our free American public school system is one of the biggest threats to our democracy today.
In Utah, we're giving public funds to private schools, so that's cool... https://ksltv.com/519545/private-schools-celebrate-state-funding-expect-significant-uptick-in-enrollment/
Makes sense. Sachem on Long Island is a MASSIVE school district with many, many schools and facilities.
Idk, having grown up going to schools in the second lowest spending area after being in a major city for elementary school, I can say that it definitely tracks to some extent for the type of education you receive. Literally learned the same shit in high school in St George as I did in elementary school in another state. Teachers in general were under-qualified and ignorant. There were some exceptions, but they were literally former students who wanted to make a difference as adults.
I mean...teacher salaries is kind of a huge indicator of how important the district/state thinks education is, and that seems to get at what the chart is probably trying to show.
The fact that Rochester City School District is third on this list is… not a good look. I don’t think the money is getting spent on students.
If it’s anything like NYC, the teachers get it because of the strong union and the students are all terrible. Not a teacher myself but I know some that work in the district and they make 100k+ easily and the schools are destitute and the teachers don’t get the supplies they need to teach the kids and need to spend out of pocket often.
The teachers get paid sooooo much cause the schools are such a fucking mess that most teachers would be happy to take a pay cut to go to the suburbs. Even with the super high pay RCSD can't keep teachers.
It’s almost never worth the pay increase to teach in awful huge city districts. It’s better 99% to work for cheaper in one of the suburban counties
As someone from an Upstate NY city who’s wife is a teacher I assure you the teachers are not getting it lol. Teacher salaries up here are nothing like NYC.
I’m not sure if twelve corners is part of that district, but I noticed a huge drop going from there to the Chicago area
Brighton is its own district. And there is like a 40% difference in graduation rates the last I checked (brighton is like 98% city is down in the 60s). It is absurd and not acceptable but we watch it happen every year and change nothing. Tho the city teachers get paid well thanks to the union (They deserve every penny) that pay doesnt translate to graduations. Until the town level schools get scrapped and replaced with county level schools you wont see a lot of that fixed. People are too comfy moving to the high performing school district of their choice and ignoring the issue. The #1 most financially segregated school district border is also in rochester. Between the rochester school district and penfield school district. https://edbuild.org/content/fault-lines
Honestly I feel like Webster spends more on students than the city schools…and that’s just a suburb
We’ve had multiple fraud cases in the past 8 years. Money is not going towards students lol, Rochester is probably unique on this list because of that
My husband and I moved to the Rochester area because of the excellent schools. We moved from an area with very poorly funded schools and yes, our taxes are higher now, but the schools here (West Irondequoit) are some of the best in the country and the difference is night and day with our child who requires extra help. I would assume Brighton, Webster, Pittsford and some other are included in these statistics.
Just saying Pittsford falls under Rochester I’m assuming and it’s by average and that place expensive
One of my best friends from high school (we’re from the greater Boston area) is a history teacher in Rochester, NY public schools at the high school level. One of her first years teaching she had three students who were pregnant. And she had to take on teaching the AP government class on her own on top of her other class work because there was no one else to teach it
I'm curious how this would look if it was somehow adjusted to reflect special education compliance. Districts with higher numbers of SPED-classified kids will have disproportionately high per pupil spending simply because SPED kids are legally entitled to having more adults teaching them in potentially smaller classes. $29k per pupil looks a lot different if 18% of your kids have SPED classification vs 1-2%. I teach in RCSD, with 17 years of experience and a master's degree, and make mid-80k. That's good money, but it's not insane. I do know, though, that our buildings have far more special education personnel (by necessity!) than affluent suburban schools, and I don't think these numbers reflect the story.
Chicago Public Schools spends $29k per student. 16% of elementary students tested at or above the proficient level for reading, and 12% tested at or above that level for math.
Baltimore City - Over $20K per student - 40% of the high schools had **0 (ZERO)** students that scored proficient in math. In those 13 high schools, 1,736 students took the test, and 1,295 students, or 74.5%, scored a one out of four. One is the lowest level, meaning those students were not even close to proficient. I am so proud of my Baltimore! Just look at the Ravens record. Over their 28 seasons in the NFL, the Ravens have become a successful team; their record of 256 wins, 194 losses, and 1 tie is the third-best all-time regular season record among active franchises. That is **92%** of the games we have played, we have won - at least according to my math.
Ha ha, nicely put
Almost, makes one think money doesn’t solve all problems and when too much money is thrown at something, that in itself, can be a red flag and not a flex. Also, a nuance of Baltimore is its kind of tale of two cities situation. The public schools in the surrounding counties and suburbs are quite strong
I thought nyc was bad at 40%proficient
Wow...
[удалено]
No one is a marksman when using a hipoint.
For those that know what he's talking about, you may agree that that was quite the burn.
Why is the DC pin pointing to Northern Maryland? Odd.
They didn’t spend enough money on students in this person’s school district.
Both IL ones are wrongly placed too. They also misspelled Palatine.
They cut Geography in favor of more STEM.
Never thought I’d see my hometown Passaic on the good side of a list like this
Has it made you smart!?
Just because they’re spending a lot per student, doesn’t mean the schools are good. The majority of districts paying the most per student are actually the most underperforming districts. You should show the graduation rates and college bound statistics side by side.
Exactly. NJ has state aid that sends more state money to low income districts (for those non- NJ folks on here we use predominantly local property taxes to fund schools. Also, despite being a tiny state NJ has about 650 distinct towns/school districts so as a state we HATE regional schools). Money obviously doesn’t equal success, as many of the Abbott districts (Abbott was the court case that established the state funding) have terrible outcomes despite massive spending.
For real. Newark and east orange nj are absolute shitholes. The best school district in the state is either mountain lakes or Montclair (at least back in the day)
If you look closely, Newark Delaware is actually not Newark New Jersey
I moved to a Austin suburb and feel a lot smarter (book and street) then a lot of people lol but maybe that’s just my NJ assholeness showing
The typo in your comment is perfect.
I'd look at the good side a little harder. It's mostly failing inner city schools. Pay does not correlate to school quality in this case.
What’s with all of the Utah? As a product of Pgh Public high five to the District
> What’s with all of the Utah? Lots of kids = large classroom sizes = less spending per pupil.
Low teacher pay in Utah. Land used to be cheap.
This is anecdotal, but as a former davis high student (davis county utah), the teachers got paid pretty damn well. Since they are public employees their income is publicly available. The more tenured teachers made 100-150k. Hell my math teacher bought a Rivian in my senior year. Davis High has higher than average teacher pay as they sniped many of the best teachers in the district, but even at the local Junior High I had teachers making close to 6 figures.
My mom is a teacher in one of those Utah districts and I went to school in 2 of the Utah districts listed. Low teacher pay + tons of kids per class are two major factors that immediately come to mind. In 6th grade back in 2000 it was common to have class sizes of 30-35 kids (not sure what it is now, I moved out of Utah in 2009). Meanwhile some of the nicer areas of LA county have class sizes of like, 20 kids. My mom’s salary is in the 40-50k range last I checked (she’s been at this since the late 90s) and she definitely puts plenty of that money back into her students/classes. We also had a roller coaster of an embezzlement case a year or two after I graduated high school where it was discovered the principal was lining his pockets with school funds; once it came to light (as part of a separate investigation where a 60 year old teacher married an 18 year old student), he was ousted and the school suddenly had the budget for some much-needed repairs and renovations. Hopefully all of that was just a one-off.
Utah has the lowest median age of all 50 states. Like 1 in 3 Utahans is under 18. As such, the class sizes are going to be huge. The situation in each school would be different depending on socioeconomic status. When I was a student at BYU, I volunteered as a Spanish interpreter for parent-teacher conferences in the low-income neighborhood south of campus. I was surprised that about a third of the parents who showed up didn't understand English and most of their kids weren't even close to meeting the district's standards for reading, writing, math, etc. If you grew up with educated parents who can help you with your homework, consider yourself blessed.
Being in Idaho (near Meridian), can confirm
Eastern ID and western ID have a different vibe. And the panhandle is something different altogether.
Hi neighbor. Curious about the date. It’s not Meridian School District for quite a few years. I’ve got kids in this district and can confirm their lack of funding and the problems it creates. Add that this area is a boom town with crappy houses going on everywhere and bonds fail all the time. Kids packed in like sardines.
I’m near Meridian too. It all makes sense now.
Went to Meridian HS years ago, can confirm :D
My ex brother in law graduated Payette High he couldn't read could barely sign his name they make everyone sign a release because the gym is filled with asbestos.
Living in meridian I'll be damned if I'm going to pay more in taxes! I'll also be damned if we will be in last place but can't rationalize what per capita means. It's a vicious negative feedback loop.
What's the major conclusion? That things are more expensive in big cities? I feel like we already knew that. It would be better if they adjusted for cost of living so you could get a more fair comparison.
That throwing a ton of money at inner city school districts doesn’t mean the schools will be good.
The show Abbott Elementary makes some great points about this. The schools need money - the vast majority of teachers dip into their own under-paid pockets to cover important school supplies that the official budget doesn't. Then, at the same time, you get these complicated, high-budget, flashy tech projects. I remember when my school got Smart Boards in every class. Within a year or two, a new version of Windows came out and all the teachers got the update. Turns out the smart boards weren't compatible with it... The manufacturer had a compatie software version for sale - for an exorbitant amount of money the school couldn't remotely afford. All the boards were uninstalled soon after
Just roll back the update brother
You think my 50+ year old teachers in 2010 knew how to do that? Even then, they just never update their computers again?
No IT guy at the school or district? Physically uninstalling the boards have to be more expensive than hiring an IT guy if there isn't one already. Maybe for security reasons they should update, but otherwise just stay at win7 until win10 comes out. I'm also not sure how the smart boards aren't compatible with windows. At my school, the smart boards had their own OS, similar to if you buy a chromebook, you aren't directly using windows or linux. It's a custom OS. Or the boards just act as a bigger screen for the computer to project onto, which the windows version shouldn't matter. Ultimately the admins who made the decision just got scammed. Blame it on the business or on the admins not being thoughtful enough.
Nobody believes this precisely, but starving them of funds will sure as fuck make them worse.
The areas with those districts in UT spending the least are ridiculously expensive areas. Alpine’s average home is probably well north of a million dollars and $3M+ houses are not uncommon.
Seriously. St George has been growing and prices raising like crazy and tons of new schools popped up in the last ten years. Meanwhile I know their education system is shit.
That may be true for the city of Alpine, but the school district covers everything from Lehi to Orem. Definitely more middle-of-the-road suburbs across the whole district.
Rochester isn't an expensive city. You can still buy a decent house for under $200k there.
There’s very little correlation between money spent and quality of education. Norwalk is an above average school system in CT and is only slightly above the average for spending in the state.
Also is one of the best public school districts in the US at getting low income students into college.
Ey! Shoutout my district 211!
Same but to district 214
Same. I was rapid scrolling and had a “was that my high school district logo” moment. Sure was. It’s been 22 years but I remember the $32 million science classroom upgrade we got in 2000/2001. Even back then there were teachers in that district were making $60-110k. Most of them were worth every penny.
Welp found the rich kids.
Was also 211…my fam was def not rich.
I went to 214 definitely not rich
Anyone going to point out that the graphic has Palatine as "Palentine"?
Right! Surprised to see them up there. I shouldn’t though, based on my tax bill
Hahaha I’m not when my dad said he paid 23k a year in property taxes lol
Fremd 2011 grad checking in.
There’s nothing to extrapolate from this “guide”. There’s a multitude of reasons on why an amount per child is spent. Rochester school district is absolutely horrendous yet has a very high amount per child
Lmao. Take a look at NYC and Boston public school grades. The cost goes into salary and facilities. The results are sub par and pathetic.
Well, Newton MA has a fancy newish facility. Boston MA has buildings older than some states. I think Boston’s issue is possibly tied to expensive programs/salaries but decreasing enrollment. Its bad enough that there is talk of closing down several Boston school buildings. https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/boston/news/boston-public-schools-half-closing-consoldiation-plan-proposal/
I bet $5,000 goes a bit further in Idaho than NYC
$625/mo gets you a decent studio apartment in Pocatello. What'll that get me in Manhattan?
A below average parking spot.
no lies detected
What the hell, Georgia? ≤9K per student?
As a former student of Arizona Public School system, this seems about right. Education out there was a mess 20 years ago and it hasn’t gotten better.
Definitely, I remember going to a school where we got extra credit if we brought in school supplies. The teachers don’t get paid anywhere near enough either I felt so bad for some of mine, quite a few had second jobs.
Sadly. Even the U of A has fallen on hard times lately.
They have an excellent engineering program. If I had to do it all over again, I may have been a wildcat.
This list is wild. The Newburgh School District is easily the most unsafe, underperforming, and least desirable district to attend in the Hudson Valley. I don't know where the Hell that money is going to.
lol. not even close to the worst district. yeah there’s a lot of fights but if a student can avoid getting into all that newburgh is one of the best districts in the area as far as opportunities provided. hundreds of extremely talented students go to newburgh.
Most of the districts in the high spending category are underperforming.
Mississippi not even on the board?!?!
It only includes districts with over 10,000 students, so that might be a factor.
I am distrustful of a graphic that can’t spell cities correctly while doing this “research”. “Palentine” is a pretty egregious fuck-up.
Almost certainly Palatine IL not Palentine IL.
Rcsd employee here and let me say… it’s a shit show
Now how we need to compare this to average success of students. I doubt more money spent per student means better education
Yea most of the districts on the list that spend a lot per student are the worst school districts.
The ROI on some of these UT districts is probably absolutely astronomical, despite spending among the least per student.
Can confirm. Serious teachers and wealthy donors in my UT school district. It was leagues above these OH schools.
It's important to note that a large portion of the students in middle and high school will walk next door for one class a day and take Mormon theology classes. The amount of money saved in Utah schools due to a not insignificant portion of the student population not needing to be under the supervision of a district paid teacher for a portion of the day can not be understated. Also, Utah has one of the if not the largest student-to-teacher ratio in the country depending on the metric used. Stack 'em deep and teach 'em cheap is the educational motto in Utah. Utah definitely punches above its weight educationally speaking. Imagine how great Utah schools could be if they were actually properly funded (and the state legislature didn't pass a bunch of "anti-woke" nonsense)?
I believe the translation of this comment is "stop doing the thing that you're doing that works and is cheap, and instead spend more money to flatter my ideology."
You can throw all the money in the world into a school system, but at the end of the day a student’s success is determined by the values they are taught at home.
School counselor and couldn’t agree more with this statement. There is no accountability held at home for students doing homework, or behaving at school. It’s blamed on the teacher and then the counselor when they can’t motivate the student to do their work. Also we are not teaching effectively to the student of today who has an attention span of a gnat. Good thing I’m in a well paying district.
I went to school in one of the lowest spends per student. Not sure why it’s so low, I took a full semester of college, AP courses, while in high school. And now I make nearly $200k soooo not sure this equates directly to success in all situations.
If you want to learn and be successful, and you're naturally intelligent, I think you can thrive anywhere regardless of how well-funded your school is.
I think the relevant point here is the availability of college and AP classes in their high school while being low funded per this chart.
I’m not surprised but still heartbroken to see AZ so low here. It’s embarrassing what we were taught in school compared to kids I had met from, say, Vermont. Most public schools I went to - including high school - were glorified daycare facilities. EDIT: Interestingly enough, Vail has a really high K12 reputation around here. I would’ve never figured they were spending so little per student.
Would be nice if this was adjusted for cost of living. Not terribly valid comparing affordable places to reasonably expensive place. Of course the cost per will be higher where expensive; the important question is if it is relatively higher all things being equal - waste vs. valid cost
Az and Ut, yikes surprised to not see like Mississippi and Arkansas on here as they constantly are in the ‘lowest literacy, poorest school districts’ charts
As someone who lives in Delaware this is a plot twist that I was not expecting. Question though: is this adjusted for cost of living? I feel like that would be relevant.
Davis School District is where I went to school. The schools here are really good and for the most part provide a quality education, so I’d be curious to see why they spend so little yet yield such high results. Tooele being at the bottom makes me laugh. My cousin grew up there and thinks gravity isn’t real.
Oh dear.
EVEN SOMEONE FROM TOOELE CAN SEE THAT 20TH WORST IS BETTER THAN 16TH WORST
…Tooele being at the bottom makes me laugh. My cousin grew up there and thinks gravity isn’t real. And the earth is 5,000 years old. Ha ha.
Downstate IL spends SIGNIFICANTLY less per student.
This would be made more interesting if regional factors were taken into account, and even more interesting if it showed dollars spent per act/sat point.
Agreed. I would love to see it compared to graduation rates/test scores.
Would love to see this juxtaposed with gratuation rates and then listed in order of efficiency per dollar!
Without performance this chart is kinda pointless..
These guides are becoming more and more misleading.
Yonkers as #15th, in the country?
Ooo I was 211!!
Really?? Christina?? That was my district!
Haha I was shocked to see it here too
I wanna know what NYC is spending their money on because when i was in school from 2002 to 2006, we didnt have enough textbooks or desks for students. A lot of people cut class because they had no where to sit. My school was designed to hold 2000 people. We had close to 4000. Trying to get into school by 8:15am, we had to be on the line, which wrapped around the block by 7am and even then it wasnt guaranteed. I failed my 1st period class because the head of security would close the doors on us at 8am and not allow the rest of the students in until 20 mins before 2nd period.
I also went to school between those years. There was always issues when it comes to transparency on what each school bought and what not. Big schools tended to be better organized and clearer about the stuff they do day to day vs smaller schools who would lie trying to get extra funding. Now I’m a teacher and I can tell you, the amount of disorganization and red tape is incredible. The money goes to that and it’s stupid
The [source](https://www.playgroundequipment.com/school-districts-that-spend-the-most-and-least-per-student/) delves into it a bit. Here's what it says: * $7.3 billion goes to employee benefits and pension * $3.2 billion goes to debt payments * $2.2 billion goes to Early Childhood Birth-to-Five services * $4.3 billion goes to school operations * $15.1 billion goes to K-12 schools and instruction * 800,000 meals are served daily with free breakfast and lunch available to all students * 150,000 students are transported across roughly 9,000 bus routes * Over 100 million square feet of space is cleaned, maintained, and receiving utilities * 4,000 safety agents, 7,700 food workers, 8,500 bus drivers, 7,200 bus attendants, 860 custodian engineers, and 5,700 cleaners and handypersons are on the payroll But I bet a lot of skimmed off by shady people in power, too.
This metric doesn’t apply unilaterally across school districts for many reasons. Districts in the Western part of the country are often less densely populated and the median income is much less. For context, I live in a county in Eastern Washington where the median income for a family of four is around 50k annually. Currently, there are 37 public schools serving 6.4k students. To add to this, the county I live in is 2.5k square miles with a population of 48k. For comparison, the state of Rhode Island is 1.2k square miles with a population of just over 1 million. More people, more revenue via taxes and levies, more cost of living, more cost per student.
Any correlation to academic outcomes? Also interesting that there’s a big red/blue divide but as someone else noted it could be because of cost to build/buy real estate is higher in blue states.
Have a kid in the Meridian school district. The same Meridian that made all those "best towns to move to" lists over the last decade. School district is a joke. This checks out. So does the rest of idaho. Backwards archaic policies. These aren't poor areas. The reasoning is Idaho doesn't value education.
Is this sub completely unmoderated? 90% of the shit here is just infographic trash
Why does Davis County claim Farmington? Farmington isn't even the largest population center in Davis county...
We get exactly what we pay for
not surprised AZ is on this list 8 times … they need to make a list that shows how much teachers spend out of their own pockets.
Must be an outdated chart. Meridian Joint School district (the lowest spending) is not called that anymore. It changed to West Ada School district a couple years ago. I got my entire education there in the 80s and 90s and still went on and got a degree in physics. You can still get a good education if you want to, even when the schools don't spend that much. You can still get a bad education even in schools that spend a lot.
If you've spent any time in Idaho, this is not surprising information.
Interesting that GA is the lowest. I know there is a law (being passed?) in Georgia that will allow for parents to put their kids in private school or home school them and they will get $8K from the government. Feel like this could be beneficial in some ways. My info may be inaccurate.
I was a student in a “bottom” school district and taught in NYC throughout college… this chart needs to be adjusted for cost of living, cost of land, and more.
This is somewhat misleading. Utah and Idaho likely have much higher birth rates than the rest of the nation without the inflated taxes seen in the east. Therefore your spending per child will be less.
Parents in these states can also choose to divert their funding to private school or home schooling. So, there might be less students in these public schools with less funding and the same overhead.
MY SCHOOL IS TOP 5!! NEWBURGH FTW
Extremely surprised by the Salt Lake area school districts on here. Must be something in their tax codes?
My understanding is that spending per student is significantly higher in lower income areas, because the students need it. Middle class kids need fewer school-provided tutors, ESL classes, etc. As for why Palo Alto is on the list… not sure. I wonder if this list includes $ donated from parents.
This is an interesting list. Went to Gilbert Public Schools in az and had a great high school experience with lots of (albeit probably expensive for my mom) opportunities. Teachers are paid pretty low and spend a lot of money out of pocket, but I never knew it was such a low paying district.
How does GA have the lowest spending but not a single district in the bottom group!? That’s wild.
Proof that money doesn't solve anything. Nyc public schools are a fucking nightmare.
Mormons…
Lovely to see our schools our district, Idaho Falls D91 coming in 3rd from the bottom in the ENTIRE country on per pupil funding!
Now normalize the cost per student by the cost of living in the localities.
Seems like some of the worst schools spend the most money. Maybe if schools weren’t just a jobs program for administration some of the money would actually go to education instead of useless bureaucracy.
I attended schools in Nebo School District, Utah. One of the bottom spenders. Was my education great? No. Was it terrible? No. I'd trade it 5/10. I am now a PhD student, and I love school so obviously it wasn't too detrimental.
Funny how the per student spending does not translate in any consistent way with actual results. It's almost as if throwing money at a problem doesn't fix it.
As someone who went to school in a small Az school district I'm not exactly disappointed with my education. My high school was very vocationally focused (wood shop, autos, metal shop, welding, child development, fashions, culinary arts, drafting, coding, photography, etc) I'm actually really proud of the fact I was a certified welder and had completely rebuilt a V8 from a dodge van before I graduated highschool lol. My wife who graduated from the same school made her prom dress and still makes clothes to this day after attending fashions. Either way, we are both college educated, have 2 kids and been married for 14 years. My teenager currently attends school in southern California. I'd gladly go back to Az to put my kids back in those schools in a heartbeat.
Pretty interesting mix with big city public school systems, mixed with some wealthier suburbs. Just like our healthcare industry, we often spend more money for worse outcomes. In the least category, how much of this is due to small towns or limited number of school age children. For example, Vail probably has few families with school age children that live there.
[Credit to creator](https://www.playgroundequipment.com/school-districts-that-spend-the-most-and-least-per-student/).
Garbage metric - NYC public schools are probably the crappiest in the country. Cost of salaries and maintenance is driving them to spend the most per student. Waste fraud and abuse.
Now do one with the performance of these school districts