Comment on The USA spends $15k/student annually which is 30% higher than the global median. Why do U.S. schools have "fundraisers" where kids are incentivized to sell stuff to people?

turtle@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

One of the major factors to consider here is that public schools in the US are not equally funded by number of students. Instead, most of the funding is provided by state and local property taxes, meaning that richer areas where houses are worth a lot more, get much better funding for their schools. So while those rich areas’ school funding is probably much higher than the global median, the poorer areas’ school funding is likely much lower, in a very high cost of living country in general.

The other factor to also consider is that public schools in the US have fairly extensive athletic programs, meaning that they spend a lot of the funds to build and maintain things like American Football stadiums, swimming pools, etc., as opposed to only funding actual academic education.

References:

en.wikipedia.org/…/Public_school_funding_in_the_U…

This is the best I could find on short notice about athletic vs academic spending, and it’s only discussing teacher vs coach salaries: linkedin.com/…/more-spent-instruction-coaches-per…

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