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

Some realism about Florida's educational rankings (totally dependent on decent 4th grade results and tuition caps on the universities) merits a downvote only because it upsets HK's narrative. The kids are all right until the system starts bringing them down between 4th and 8th grade. Just look at Florida's own grades for middle school, mostly terrible.

While governments have an interest in education, they need not provide the education (any more than they need to provide food, automobiles, or clothing). That can be left to others, whether homeschoolers, tutors, or private schools. James Tooley, a self-described philosopher of education, has written several books on how extremely poor people will avoid having their kids educated in public schools in many African nations as well as India and China. Extremely poor parents fork over much of their limited funds to have their kids educated privately, finding that private schools, though underfunded relative to their public competitors, are more accountable.

The Beautiful Tree: A personal journey into how the world's poorest people are educating themselves

Really Good Schools: Global Lessons for High-Caliber, Low-Cost Education

BS. Forced integration, at least in this area, is the worst thing that has happened to public schools. It's accelerated the flight of not just "rich kids" but poorer kids whose families realize what a crap job the city public schools do.

Nope. Good Catholic school 15k per year.

Defeat communism ---- Privatize the schools!

It costs on average just over $17,000 per student (higher in some states, less in others). That is a lot but it costs a hell of a lot more to not educate young people.

"Economically, each high school dropout is estimated to cost society approximately $292,000 over their lifetime in terms of lost tax revenue, increased public welfare, and incarceration expenses." That is from the Department of Education. Increased education spending also has a direct impact on how much, on average, a student will make over his/her lifetime.

By the way, Republicans have been, of late, the major perpetrators when it comes to heaping new mandates onto public schools. Mandates cost a lot. They cost even more when they are not funded. And, by the way, there is a hell of a lot of really good teaching going on in the public schools - by incredibly underpaid and overworked teachers. Yes, there are bad teachers but society gets a lot of value out of them. Public schools built this country.

Why don't you send your kids to an inner city hellhole school? Liberals talk about the greatness of urban public schools from their 90% wealthy, white / Asian suburbs where the remainder is wealthy blacks and Hispanics.

If you actually lived in a sh!tty city (Chicago: 55 schools without 1 student proficient in reading OR math, Baltimore: 23 without 1 proficient in math, etc) you'd feel differently

Cristo Rey is a model for high schools where poorer families got great results by using work-study. Their “salaries” went to tuition, and it made children from weaker backgrounds able to work in competitive places.

Exactly. Suburban white libs love to virtue signal but they would never ever ever ever send their little double-vaxxed, triple-boosted angels to a public school in inner city Chicago or Baltimore. And they would vehemently oppose their kids being sent there in some kind of "forced integration" scheme as per previous commenter. They lose their minds with vein-popping fury when this reality is pointed out.

because the cost of teachers and admin. 185 days of work a year with 7 hour days. I taught Physical Educaton. Salary $118K with two coaching contracts worth $6K ea. Went on to be principal at an elementary school for $165K.

This is from The Economist (hardly a "Woke" publication):

economist.com

A lottery to lose

An enlightened scheme to benefit poor children seems to do the opposite

Open link

From the article: "As part of its recovery from Hurricane Katrina, which destroyed many
schools in New Orleans, Louisiana undertook one of America’s largest
school-choice schemes. According to a new paper by Atila Abdulkadiroglu of Duke
University, Parag Pathak of MIT and Christopher Walters of Berkeley, it has not
gone well.

"It turned out that this was a lottery to lose. The three economists found that
those who received vouchers and moved to private schools had worse test scores
in maths, reading, science and social studies than those who missed out.
Hunting for an explanation, they wondered whether the weakest private schools
had mopped up voucher pupils to fill their seats. But this hypothesis did not
stand up."

There is a lot of informational vomit being repeated here. Yes, there are problems but a lot of the criticisms offered here (though not all) are not accurate.