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Comment by CharlesW | Hacker News Reader

> Education is a money pit.

How exactly do you mean this?

The U.S. spent $90.5 billion for "Elementary, Secondary, and Vocational Education" in 2021* (a subset of "Education, Training, Employment, and Social Services"), which is 1.3% of $6.82 trillion in total 2021 government expenditures. Compare to $696.5B for Medicare, $754.8B for National Defense, etc.

If anything, this illustrates how relatively unimportant a base level of education is in the U.S.

* https://datalab.usaspending.gov/americas-finance-guide/spend...

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The US government spends significantly more on education than the military, ~$800B on K-12 education alone. On a per student basis, the US spends more than almost any other country in the world. If US education is poor, it isn't for lack of government spending.

Per the US Department of Education[0], the US spends 34% more per student than the OECD average. At the post-secondary level, the US spends double the OECD average.

[0] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...

You're only looking at federal funding here. Most public school funding in the US comes from states.

My state of Washingon spent $17.5 billion on schooling this year, on top of that federal funding.

Thank you for making that very important point.

That looks like ~28% of the state budget, and per-student spending appears to very high (the 4th highest in the U.S.). Washington is spending 1.5X per student as compared to California, and is apparently not seeing commensurate improvements. I wonder if there are folks working on debugging the apparent inefficiencies of state education systems.

It's often not even state budget in the US. In the case of my town, while I believe some money comes from the state in the form of grants etc., about 60% of my town's property taxes go to funding the elementary school and a split (with two other towns) of the regional high school district.

“Total expenditures for public elementary and secondary schools in the United States were $800 billion in 2018–19 (in constant 2020–21 dollars). This amounts to $15,621 per public school pupil enrolled in the fall of that year.”

https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66

Yeah except 1) discretionary spending (including defense is like 25% of total spending (with defense ~1/2 of that), so the 90b is a meaningful part of discretionary spending. 2) as others have pointed out, the vast majority of (80%-90%+?) is funded by state and local government.

https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57172

As explained below your numbers are off by an order of magnitude. But I’m shocked to see such a basic misconception about how our government works on HN of all places.

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