The Corner

Re: School Budgets

Good point from a reader:

“A quick way to debunk the ‘we need more money’ claims from public schools:

calculate how much they are spending per class.

“Lets suppose the district is spending $8,000 per student, which I believe is below the national average and well below what they spend in your region.

If each class has 20 students, which again would be quite low, they are spending $160,000 per class. If there are 25 students then its $200,000. On what? Pay the teacher $80,000 and you still have $80,000 left for the building, administrators, buses, books, etc, $120,000 if you use the bigger class.

“Give me $100,000 to educate 20 kids for a year and I’ll gladly quit my job as an attorney, rent the necessary facilities, and provide a much better education to them than the public schools do.

“As a homeowner who would under no circumstances allow any of my five children to attend any public school (which means I am giving up a

$1/2 million government subsidy), I find the amounts the government spends on schools to be utterly outrageous.”

John Derbyshire — Mr. Derbyshire is a former contributing editor of National Review.
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