Why's it cost every household $5000 in taxes just to run a public school?

$5k per household is nothing.

I live in an affluent NYC suburb. Average teacher salary is $120k. My property taxes for a modest home (about average for our town) are $18k a year. Teacher to student ratio is 15-1.

All schools are rated near the top so there is no need to send kids to private schools. Still, many do.

Education is expensive.

Rich people typically pay less in taxes when you include all taxes, not just federal income taxes. Payroll taxes, sales taxes, state taxes, taxes on every item you buy, meal taxes, increased prices on everything you buy due to taxes, fees for everything you do, etc. Not even considering the lotteries which target poorer people

Spoken by someone who lives in a nice, 90% white / Asian suburb with the remainder wealthy Hispanics and Africans. If you lived in Baltimore or DC you'd view it differently.

DC has a small system compared to any state. Of course the cost will be higher per pupil.

280K seems about what you would have to offer to get anyone competent to do a job like that. In fact, I'm surprised it is not much higher. Any money wasted in education spending is that money spent on sports, bands, etc. Get rid of all that, then lets talk.

Except every house pays that "nothing" whether they have kids or not.

Nothing in government is as expensive as the inefficiency, corruption, and waste of government makes it seem.

You could delete the position completely and get the same results. That's a problem.

Throwing money at the symptoms of problems doesn't work.

You could spend $1 million per student in DC and it would still be one of the worst districts in the country because there are no parents in sight and the culture is broken.

If the parents don't care the kids don't care. If the parents and kids don't care the teachers have no shot no matter how much you pay them.

Assuming this is true (I'm guessing not or you'd have a source), this actually seems really cheap. Of course it differs by location and whatnot, but considering a solid private school is AT LEAST $30k, a decent public school seems like a bargain.

What's your alternative, though?

Sooooo.... you want to be surrounded by idiots? $5k to live in a society of people who can read, do basic math, function, etc. is a total bargain. While I agree government is not super efficient, I'm really not sure what your alternative idea is. Private everything is super expensive (exhibit A, healthcare).

Poor districts need to spend more because a lot of the money goes towards non-educational expenses like metal detectors, counseling, free lunch, etc.

The Department of Education didn't even exist until 1980.

Do you believe everyone was an idiot prior to 1980?

The DoE's budget is $90 billion this year and the only purpose it seems to have is making education worse.

That's $7.2 million for every school district in America that's been flushed down the toilet just to employ bureaucrats who serve no useful purpose and provide zero value to education or the students.

Lol at anyone who thinks the purpose of public schools is to "educate" children and prepare them for the real world.

The purpose of public schools, particularly in large urban areas where there is no ideological balance, is to indoctrinate kids with left wing grievance propaganda and siphon money to the Democratic party via forced union donations from teachers.

Alexis de Tocqueville marveled at America's extraordinarily high literacy rate in the 1830s. Modern day home schoolers (100x the kids relative to 50 years ago) are proving that real education happens for a tiny fraction of what public and private schools spend per capita.

Metal detectors is because of the culture occurring in these inner city hellholes.

Be honest. The parent doesn’t care. It’s almost never parents - a father is never present

And that culture is a direct result of single motherhood and broken homes. Until this issue is addressed any money spent to alleviate downstream symptoms may as well be burned in the street.

You think those Drag Queen readers come cheap?

My property taxes were $9,100 on a house that is appraised at $617k. Only $3,400 of the taxes were for the K-12 schools. My school district spends about $13k per student. Suburban school districts spend about $9-10k per student. But costs are much lower in the burbs because all the schools are full, which is the most efficient use of the fixed costs for buildings, maintenance, etc. In the City, there are lots of schools that are half full because charters pull out all the good kids and leave a hot mess behind. And the low income schools have very high demand for SPED and social services, which are expensive. My wife is a speech pathologist at a school where 99% of the kids qualify for Title 1. Almost every day they have to have counselors, social workers etc. intervene because a kid shows up to school with bruises all over or comes to school after being absent for a week and is noticeably malnourished or tells a teacher that they are afraid that their dad is going to beat their mom again. And the school district is cutting about 100 of these social support staff due to budget cuts, which means that teachers and SPED staff will have to pick up the slack even though they have no training or qualifications to handle these interventions.

The solution to terrible parenting isn't throwing money at the schools.

And if you were in Baltimore, you’d pay $13k in property tax for some of the worst schools (and public services in general) in the country

And before the wokes b!tch about so-called “white flight”, upper middle class blacks don’t send their kids to the complete garbage Baltimore public schools either. They either live in the county or send their kids to a private school

Average private school tuition is $12,139 per student. Average public school expenditure per student is $16,080. Do some research before posting.