It may well be the case that US aggregate education spending is plenty high – but unless it were centrally collected and equitably distributed (taking into account differences in cost of living, cost of real-estate, etc.) to produce equivalent average outcomes, that's not really relevant.
Generally, the underperforming schools spend more per student. For example, Stuyvesant, the premier math/science high school in New York, is among other lowest of public high schools in spending per student.
Underperforming schools typically have higher costs, like ESL and special needs courses, free lunch, police presence, though.
>When critics insist that American teachers need to be held accountable for the poor performance of American school children, the teachers shoot back that they are being held accountable for the failure of American parents and taxpayers to take care of their children.
>When some of us point out that there has been no improvement in the performance of all high school students or of protected subgroups of students in the United States on NAEP measures of reading and mathematics in 30 years, they tell us we should consider ourselves lucky that we have teachers who have been able to hold student performance steady while the American people have been sending them students who get poorer and more isolated every year.
>…the U.S. spends much more per student on our schools than the countries with the best education performance. But it is also the case that other countries, with higher student performance and lower school spending per student, have smaller disparities in income between their wealthiest families and their poorest ones, and despite that, spend much more than we do on the support of families with young children on everything from child allowances to child care and early childhood education. From my vantage point, our budgets for children, families and schools, if you take everything into account, do very little about the enormous problems caused by concentrated poverty and racial segregation and then load all the problems that causes onto the schools.
>…It is a whole lot cheaper to do right by our children starting when mom is pregnant than it is to wait six years, when it is a whole lot harder to do what must be done to give these kids a chance in a world in which the skill threshold for earning a decent living is getting higher and higher.
-Marc Tucker
https://ncee.org/2019/12/child-poverty-and-its-impact-on-edu...
The argument that the US already spends a lot so nothing should be done feels loose at best.
The US education system is not there to accelerate students, to lift them up. It is model the population to suit the needs of the country. That's why nearly every aspect of a child's life revolves around school, from how and when they eat to who they socialize with. The system is there to reinforce national ideas. Some of that is noble ("try hard and get ahead") and some of it is not ("money counts"). When viewed from that perspective it works very well: little ever seems to change from one generation to the next. Freedom through social stability.
hmmmm