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Why is it always about more money?

The US is usually in the top 3 spending per student (beaten only by small countries that represent statistical outliers like Norway or Luxemburg), so really, it spends the most. Yet, as many are quick to point out, all that money results in educational outcomes well below many European countries and also many Asian countries that spend far, far less.

The money is largely not going to teacher salaries, classroom supplies, or to anything that affects "educational outcomes".

So you claim.

Luckily, this is researched extensively, and schools must publish budgets. Typically, spending on 'instruction' is >60% of the expenditures, almost all of that is salaries and benefits. Capital outlay is usually around 8-10%, support services and administration around 10%, operations and maintenance around 10%, and around 5% for transportation/bussing.

Contrary to the typical claims that 'administration' or capital costs suck up all the money, the majority of the money does go to teachers' salary.

The US also spends something like 4x as much for a major construction project than other rich nations like UK or Germany.

The US is just a pretty expensive country. The cost of labor (highly correlated with wages) is pretty high compared to Europe even outside the coastal cities. Maybe not 4x though.

It would also be interesting to compare educational outcomes in particular US states to particular European countries. I suppose that the quality of education may be as unevenly distributed across the US as it is across Europe.

Ah yes the ol' "Let's just cut the military budget" position.

Teachers salaries are 100% a local issue. If you want to raise their salary then vote to increase taxes in your county. Teachers are state employees. The states governments are more than capable enough to solve these issues since they are local issues.

To be fair, state and local governments would have to increase the total tax burden on their populace to increase education funding, or makes cuts to other things in their domain. The federal government could certainly cut the military budget and grant those funds to state or local education programs, without increasing anyone's tax burden.

That said, my understanding is that the military budget mostly goes to salaries, so any drastic cuts would leave us with massive unemployment. You'd have to take things really slow to make that big a change in the labor force without pretty ugly side effects.

And don't forget, military needs teachers as much as anybody. When there's no war soldiers are on stand-by. What do they do? They train, which is really a form of education. They could learn many things besides how to use weapons. They could learn how to be teachers when they are ready to leave the military. :-)

>Or, and hear me out: we could cut our military budget (which is larger than the next ten or so countries combined, both total and per capita)

No, it's not. Russia, Israel, and Saudi Arabia all spend more as a percentage of GDP on their militaries than America.

How can you say "No, it's not," when OP provided a very clear definition of how they're measuring ("both total and per capita") and you provided a completely different one ("as a percentage of GDP").

When America isn't even near the top of spending-per-GDP, there's no way it's higher than all the other countries combined in per-capita spending.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...

>USA's military spending in 2021 hit $801bn a year, says the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. In comparison Russia's military spending in 2021 hit only $66bn.

US population: 329.5 million, Russian population: 144.1 million,

Per capita spending US: $24,600. Russia: $458

While I’m at it: US GDP: 20.94 trillion, 1.483 trillion

US military spending as percent of GDP: 3.8%, Russia: 4.5%

Now you can see how there is a way.

And “not near the top of spending per GDP” is not really an accurate assessment. From this data https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/defense-s... we can see that the countries with higher spending per GDP fall into one or more of the following categories:

- smaller, poorer countries

- countries involved in active military conflicts or with active military conflicts near them

- petrostates

This is simply a math fail, or not recognizing that the combined GDP of "Russia, Israel and Saudi Arabia" doesn't even come close to the GDP of the United States.

I'm not familiar with US Private vs. Public schools so which one requires you to pay for the lunch?

In many countries in Europe there are only public schools.

A public school in America (but not in England) is a state run school which may or may not have free lunches (it's often income related), Private schools are ones you pay to go to and tend to charge for food or order out for food.

It’s not often income-related, it’s always income-related. All public schools offer free/reduced price lunches and even schools in high-income areas will have some small number of students who qualify:

https://high-schools.com/directory/ca/cities/beverly-hills/b...

Although, after googling highest-income school district in the US, not all school districts do:

https://high-schools.com/directory/ny/school-districts/scars...

I would have said that but for the email I recently got informing me that all students were getting free lunchs in my son's district. I think it's a covid related state program maybe?

I’m not saying you’re wrong but it surprises me that there are many countries in Europe with no (or even very few) private schools - are you thinking of Former soviet bloc countries?

> fund schools well enough that teachers don't have to pay out of pocket for basic supplies like chalk and paper

You mean funding the vacation plans of all the administration ?