America spends more than $600 billion on schools. Here's where it goes and why it matters. - Vox

America spends more than $600 billion on schools. Here's where it goes and why it matters. - Vox:
America spends more than $600 billion on schools. Here's where it goes and why it matters

 By the time a student finishes college, more money is spent on his or her education in America than in nearly every other country in the world.

That's because the US, compared with other developed countries, spends a lot on education. Yet all that money is yielding only middling results on international tests.

So why is American education so expensive? Partly because other social spending is low; education is expected to play a bigger role in social mobility, particularly for low-income students. And partly because education is mostly a state and local policy issue, so the way the money is spent isn't always equally distributed or particularly logical. School districts in some states spend more to educate wealthy students than poorer ones.

Court cases have forced states to divide the money more equally. But often that just increases the overall pot of money rather than redistributing it — even though the spending increases appear to make a difference in students' lives.

1) The US spends more on education but less on other social programs

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) has promised to cut domestic spending. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

The US spends the most per student of any nation in the developed world: $15,171 per student in 2011. The average in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development was just $9,313.

That number factors in spending by everyone, not just governments. And it includes higher education — which is more expensive in the US than anywhere else in the world. Still, even when you look just at K-12, the US is spending more on each student than most other countries.

The US spends $11,193 for each student at the primary levels, more than all but three other nations — Switzerland, Norway, and Luxembourg. Those three, as well as Austria, also spend more than the US on secondary education. The US spends $12,464 per student on high school.

But nations that spend less on education are faring far better on international tests, and the US isn't seeing bigger scores as a result of its larger spending. Poland, Finland, and South Korea, where 15-year-olds performed better on those 2012 tests than American students, spend less per student than the US does.

There are a few possible explanations for this. The first is that the US spends less on social programs than some other countries. Finland spends much less per student than the US. But it spends more to reduce poverty, and across the OECD, students in poverty have lower test scores than their higher-income peers. The United States has one of the highest child poverty rates in the developed world — five times higher than Finland's. The money Finland spends to close that gap doesn't show up in the school spending numbers.

Another explanation is that US education is simply inefficient and could be better run without additional spending. Poland, for example, has made dramatic improvements in its students' performance on international tests while still spending much less per student than the US does. Even when education spending is expressed as a share of the economy, South Korea spends about as much per student as the US does and sees much better results.

2) Teachers in the US make more than teachers in other countries, but less than other American college-educated workers

(Shutterstock)

About 60 percent of the $12,608 spent on each public school student in the US in the 2010-'11 school year went to instruction — paying and providing benefits to teachers and teachers' aides.

When compared with teachers in other countries, American teachers are generally well-paid:they make more at all points in their career than the average for teachers in the OECD. But teaching isn't a particularly well-paid profession anywhere. In all OECD countries, teachers make less than the average person with a bachelor's degree.

Because American salaries for people with a bachelor's degree are unusually high, that gap is wider in the US than anywhere else. In other words, teachers are well-paid by international standards for teachers. But they're underpaid by the standards of what college graduates in the US generally make.

Schools spend much more per student today than in 1970 — more than twice that amount, after adjusting for inflation — in part because they employ many more teachers than they used to. There are now about 12 students for every teacher employed by a school, down from 22 students per teacher in 1970. (Salaries have increased only slightly: after adjusting for inflation, public school teachers make about 10 percent more today than in 1970.)

Part of the reason education spending has increased is because the number of children with disabilities has grown much faster than the general population of students, and schools are now required to educate them. Special education students cost, on average, about twice as much to educate as other students. So one reason education in the US has become more America spends more than $600 billion on schools. Here's where it goes and why it matters. - Vox: