Mountain Man,
The amount spent on each government schooled K-12 child is closer to $11,000. This is federal, state, and local combined.
The following is an explanation:
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.