If you think that running a country on educated folks is to expensive try having it run on jerks. Globalheater
To Globalheater,
America spends plenty on education. It spends more on education that the military. ( federal, state, and local combined) This amounts to MORE than $10,870 per government schooled K-12 child per year. It is MORE than $2,500 per taxpayer.
So....compare these expenses to the cost of my alma mater, St. Joan of Arc. The tuition for this school in the year 2002-2003 was a mere $2,383. That is less than the cost of babysitting!
We can pour money down the government school rat hole and we will still get the same results!
Solution: Begin the process of completely privatizing universal K-12 education.
Government school taxes have turned our citizens into a nation of renters! It is our government who really owns our homes and business. Refuse to or fail to pay your property-school taxes and the government, using sheriffs will evict you. ( Real bullets in those guns on the hip)
Government school taxes are driving industry off-shore, forcing mothers into the work force, and for all this still fail to educate our children.
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http://www.reformk12.com/archives/000174.nclk
Doing the Math Here's how we came up with the numbers used in this article.
Using the data from the 2000 U.S. Census, the US population is about 281 million, with about 72 million of these under 18 (pdf). To figure about how many school-age kids there are we divided the 72.3 by 18, then multiplied by 13 to encompass the grades K-12. This gives us an estimate about 52.2 million kids in Kindergarten through 12th grade.
Interestingly, while searching for other statistics we came across this 1999 Census report on education (pdf) with all sorts of breakdowns of the student population, including how many in each category of age. We added up the columns for Kindergarten, Elementary, Middle, and High School and reached a total 52.6 million, satisfyingly close to our original estimate.
Now what about private schools? "Public Schools: Make Them Private" by Milton Friedman, and "How Members of Congress Practice School Choice" by Krista Kafer and Jonathan Butcher from the Heritage Foundation both indicate about 10% of students are enrolled in private schools. Subtracting 10% of 52.6 million for private school and another million for homeschooled kids gives us a final estimate of about 46 million public school kids. To keep the numbers user-friendly we'll call this 50 million.
According to the U.S. Department of Education, taxpayer expenditures for education this school year is over $501.3 billion. Rounding to $500 billion this gives us a ballpark estimate of $10,000 per school-age child. (Note that this is an underestimate, since the actual number of public school students is closer to 46 million, giving us an average of about $10,870 per kid in public school.)
Subtracting persons under 18 from the U.S. population, we get about 209 million folks 18 and over, which we rounded to 200 million, since some folks don't pay taxes. These 200 million citizens pay $500 billion in taxes for education, or $2,500 per taxpayer on average, per year.
Dollar-wise, this means it takes about four taxpayers to pay the government for the education of one child.
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http://www.cato.org/dailys/09-08-03.html
The most recent figures available from the U.S. Department of Education show that in 2000 the average tuition for private elementary schools nationwide was $3,267. Government figures also indicate that 41 percent of all private elementary and secondary schools -- more than 27,000 nationwide -- charged less than $2,500 for tuition. Less than 21 percent of all private schools charged more than $5,000 per year in tuition. According to these figures, elite and very expensive private schools tend to be the exception in their communities, not the rule.
Many people may think private schools are expensive because the costlier private schools also tend to be the most well known. For example, many in Houston have heard about St. John's or Tenney High School, where tuition runs over $13,000 a year. But fewer Houstonians have likely heard of Southeast Academy, Woodward Acres, or Pecan Street Christian Academy, all of which charge less than $3,000 per year, well below the city's private school average of $4,468.
Average private school tuition in other cities tells the same story: a large number of moderately priced private schools with a few very expensive, well-known exceptions. Median private elementary school tuition in Denver is $3,528. In Charleston, $3,150. In Philadelphia, $2,504. In New Orleans, $2,386.
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http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pdupont/?id=95001424
Federal spending on K-12 education will top $41 billion in 2004. Add in state and local spending, and the figure rises to a record half-trillion dollars. That's double the amount spent in 1990 and a third more than the $375 billion the U.S. will spend on defense this year. The negligible impact of this ever-increasing cash infusion on reading scores is illustrated in this chart: