I’ve been in PTA fights over this and yelled at superintendents in multiple school district meetings now. The real answer of where the money is going? Contractors.

Everything is done by contractors now because it’s easy to sever and it allows organizations to focus on one thing they’re good at. Do you need janitorial staff or do you need to keep things clean? Well the answer is you need to keep things clean - so how? Just pay the contractors because the school board got bribed. Sure, it turns out the contractors cost 3x the cost of a dedicated janitorial staff in the long run, but they were quicker to set up and the board wanted a turnkey solution.

That’s the approach that every school board uses to answer that question. Need X - ok well we don’t want to hire anyone because that makes people mad about how we use money… so we’ll spend MORE money on Y over the long run for something that will be a permanently reoccurring cost. Anyone go to a school cafeteria recently? Did you get food served on disposable styrofoam treys or were you given a melamine tray and plate with reusable utensils? Just kidding I know the answer to that already. Do we provide school supplies to students at the district level? No, every man for themselves go to walmart and pay $60 for school supplies for each child with all the markup instead of letting the district buy them by the pallet and distribute at the cost of wholesale for 15% the total price of everyone wastefully purchasing their own.

Don’t forget that school boards are notoriously easy to corrupt. Usually it’s something relatively benign like a board member has a family member that owns a company that does contract work and they were recommended to the rest of the board. But often it is outright bribes.

But this short sighted view of how to run things is making everything expensive in America. Everything has ten fucking middlemen between you and what you want. And they’re all goddamn contractors now. Cheap in the immediate but far more expensive over time. Why? Because we aren’t allowed to have honest conversations about government expenses anymore. We aren’t allowed to ask for real services for our children because of the short term demands of the bottom line. And when we do open up those conversations, the calculus shows the quarterly expense of hiring a permanent employee is more than maintaining the contract even though that employee is cheaper at the 5 year mark. We aren’t allowed to dig ourselves out once we’re stuck in the pit bought by contracts.

Edit: To expand on the list of contractors that now handle (BADLY) the same work done by roles that were traditionally employees who gave a shit and were held to a standard of care and duty:

• Cafeteria food preparation (dont even get me started on the quality and cost of aramark dog prison cafeteria food)
• Cafeteria cleanup
• Bathroom sanitation
• Basic plumbing like unclogging fucking toilets
• landscaping
• replacing lightbulbs (!)
• basic IT services

I’ve heard rumblings of replacing:

• student counselors
• school nurse
• bus drivers
• HR

About the only jobs safe are the principals and teachers and the football coach and that is only true while unions exist.

Textbooks are a racket and not just for college students.

Most of the money spent on education involves grifts for stuff like that, not for actual important shit like schools or teachers.

It encourages then to develop that grindset early.

Looking at the global median isn’t a good comparison, for starters. Many of those school systems aren’t comparable.

That said, there’s not likely to be one reason. I could guess at them, but I’d rather not since some will inevitably be wrong.

Others may have different experiences, but AFAIK schools tend to be funded by the property taxes in their district. Combined with rampant, unchecked, failed desegreation, and you have some schools that are swimming in cash while everyone else begs to close that gap.

All you have to do is look at how much of the collected money actually guess to the school then ask what happens to the rest. That’s why.

Have to teach kids to beg for the bare essentials early in life. That way they’ll never know it could be different.

Not the only reason, but the cost of living is higher in the U.S. than most other locales on the planet.

The real issue is these funds aren’t evenly distributed per student, school districts are funded by property tax which leads to poorer neighborhoods getting considerably less funding.

Well I’d reckon that that 15k is an average. Rich kid schools don’t need fundraising but poor districts do. Oh yeah and the funding for schools comes from local districts so if you live in a rich neighborhood your school is way more funded than if you live in the poor areas, which is why people are obsessed with that info if they have kids and want to move.

Also not all departments get the same funding. The football team gets a lot of the budget but the arts get scraps at best. So even if you’re in an ok school, because of how they spend the money, specific classes might need help.

Why the football team? The games bring in money, people donate because of the local team, and the odd lottery that one of those kids becomes a professional and might help out in the future.

without digging into the numbers, i can pretty confidently say that schools are more than 30% more expensive than the global median in the US. staffing costs especially.

Criminally underfunded, plus capitalism as a value.

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There are some that blame administration costs, which is correct because of the multiple layers of redundancy in US schools - each district has its own administration, plus more at the state level - but some also blame the rising costs of benefits.

The latter seems far more of a right wing target because they attack the employee getting benefits, not the insurance companies jacking up the costs of benefits like health or life insurance.

Capitalism.