> Even today the United States is either at the top or near the top of education spending per student
And the US is dead near the bottom in social spending. As a result American schools are asked to do a hell of a lot more than other nations.
American teacher salaries are higher than overseas but, by US standards, teachers aren't paid very much. In the US salaries are high but social safety nets are non-existent. In California it's even more extreme because the cost of living is out of control (arguably because of Prop 13).
> little to show for it in terms of results.
Curious why you think that.
The UCs are the envy of the planet and, before Jarvis, they were free. People bust their ass at IIT, Tsingua, or ETH Zurich then fly over here for grad school at UCLA where they ultimately land jobs at American companies. Why you'd want to defund this process I have no idea. Seems like the kind of thing we should be aggressively expanding.
For K-12, unlike most of the world, US schools have been educating more and more people from different ethnic backgrounds. It's no secret that blacks and hispanics do worse on standardized math tests and when you mix them in with the rest of course average scores go down. But when you slice by ethnicity both groups individually have been improving.
> someone, may be at the administrative levels, is obviously profiting.
"obviously" you should be able to point to who it is