It clearly isn’t children, who are learning less and less and being turning into robotic social justice warriers who can’t think critically or tolerate hearing any disagreement. It definitely is the Dumocrat party, which recycles more money paid to teachers and administrators into political contributions. It definitely is teachers and administrators who get paid more and more, while our children don’t learn anything useful. Countries like Russia and China run circles around us in teaching critcal subjects like math and science while we teach critical race theory. It clearly isn’t parents, who pay more and more in taxes and can’t figure out what the hell is going on with their children, because curriculums are hidden from them. The chart below says it all: spend more, learn less.
The Healthy Skeptic is a website about the health care system, and is written by Kevin Roche, who has many years of experience working in the health industry. Mr. Roche is available to assist health care companies through consulting arrangements through Roche Consulting, LLC and may be reached at 
Apple Podcasts
Google Podcasts
Spotify
Overcast
PocketCasts
Radio Public
Stitcher
Anchor
RSS - Posts
And yet our high school graduation rates are up while the disparities between white students and students of color in every measure are among the greatest in the U.S. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/2021/coi_508c.pdf
The excess spending is designed to benefit the teachers.
A few years ago, our local school district was spending a lot of money building additions to several schools ( in a district with a no growth in student enrollment – ie not a growing school district).
I ran into the school board president at a 9th grade volleyball game (our daughters played on the same team).
I asked the school board president why the district was spending “taxpayer money” to build the school building additions.
Her response was that it wasnt taxpayer money, it was bond money.
I mention her response since it provides some insight into the mentality / source of the spending.
One of talking points of the teachers union is that teachers are underpaid and that is the primary reason for the high turnover in teachers.
Anyone who makes that comment really has no comprehension of the labor market – though the explanation above is the common belief.
The first point is the labor market is not one big homogenous market, but a few thousand sub market
1) everybody naturally gravitates to the job they have the natural apptitude for.
2) every profession has a high turnover in the first couple of years as the individual figures out what they like doing.
3) some professions have lower turnover than others, primarily because weeding out is done in college instead of after they graduate. the medical profession, engineer, law have much lower turnover in the first years of the job market since the rigor of college weeds those unqualified out . The education degree course dont weed out very many in college because the rigor of an education degree is relatively low.
4) the actual labor pool of qualified teachers is fairly small and it is limited by those that have the natural apptitude to teach.
5) higher compensation will only accomplish a) getting teachers paid more than their skill set justifies, b) encourage individuals who lack the apptitude to enter the teaching profession and c) make it harder to weed out bad teachers because the over compensation will delay those unqualified from leaving on their own accord.
A public service announcement/comment – one of the most important concept to understand is micro economics and the supply and demand curves. Most every comment made by politicians on both sides of the aisle are devastated with a basic micro economic analysis.
So looking at this mathematically one would theorized that there appears to be an inverse relationship between spending and achievement. Now correlation is not necessarily causation, but I think this one could be tested and verified. The reason being that virtually all of the additional funding does not go to anything related to education.
The fact that in the new mantra of “equity” high achievement is racist, along with knowledge and hard work. We have dumbed ourselves down to the point we can no longer even recognize our own gender. The graduation rates are unrelated to achievement; they are related to grade inflation. A recent “student” in San Francisco was awarded a scholarship for her stellar performance – at a school she had not attended in two years.
The lower results would be quickly fixed if we took that 13.5k per student and gave it to parents as vouchers towards any school they choose.
The left opposes this because they do not care about teaching kids to read or write or do math. They want indoctrination and are completely satisfied with the current state of education.
A similar analysis was done in Central NJ a few years back. The school district with the higher per student spend (over $24,000 per) was Asbury Park which had less than a 50% graduation rate. They also had the most up-to-date facilities. It is not hard to see that the overspending is the primary consideration and intentional for the reasons cited and the educational outcome is not the primary focus.