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Comment by davidf18 | Hacker News Reader

The $20K per year per pupil that NYC (and other large cities) spends is skewed because of the enormous costs of special education. I don't know the numbers for NYC, but from an article I saw about Philly: cost to educate non-special need child: $10K, moderately special need: (7% of students) $20K, severe special need: (another 7% of students) $40K.

I suspect Salt Lake City has a much lower amount of special needs students.

Still, we spend an enormous amount of money on K-12 education in NYC and other large cities.

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Special education is a self perpetuating bureaucracy everywhere. Not to say the programs don't offer super valuable services to those in need, but my experience is it's really hard to get your kids out of special ed when they are ready to mainstream.

In my daughters case they fought us for two years, we eventually moved her to a charter school that mainstreamed her immediately. 2 years later she's made the honor roll twice.

> "2 years later she's made the honor roll twice."

:-)

> I suspect Salt Lake City has a much lower amount of special needs students.

With less abortion I'd guess there's a higher prevalence of, for example, Down's Syndrome.

http://archive.sltrib.com/story.php?ref=/test/ci_13891834

Just raw per student spending without adjusting for cost of living is silly also. If a Manhattan school is spending 14k per student, and a school in the middle of Iowa is spending 12k per student... do some COLA adjustments and you may find Manhattan is a "deal".

"I suspect Salt Lake City has a much lower amount of special needs students."

Why do you suspect that?

I'm not sure of your overall point, but are you implying it's bad to spend more on special needs students?

> I suspect Salt Lake City has a much lower amount of special needs students.

But one could assume the ratio stays the same, and thus so does the average (modulo the notes of other commenters e.g. cost of living).

That however might not be the case, for various reasons cultural (does one population tend to homeschool special needs children more?) and "technical" (do parents of special ed children go to big cities for treatment/infrastructure?).

Anecdote: I suspect if you're the parent of a special needs kid and you're not filthy rich and you want to have access to the best specialists and, frankly, access to other special needs kids then it makes sense to move to the East Coast. This may be changing but for a long time East Coast schools were the only place where your kid could spend any quality time with an autism specialist. Part of it, I think, is just the fact that a lot of the research and the teaching colleges happen to be on the East Coast so there's a kind of knowledge community effect at work and this leads to better infrastructure. It's a situation where you need all the help you can get.

Everything costs more in the largest cities because it's so expensive to live there.

What, that sounds like a tautology?

No. A car costs the same, but you need to pay much more for parking. Your housing costs are much, much higher, and so you need a higher salary. Everyone needs a higher salary to afford to live there, so labor costs are higher. The cost to build a school is higher (both real estate and construction costs) and you need to pay all your staff more so that they can live close enough to work at your school.

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