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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   25565 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 2025

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Yeah, I'm hoping that is the total for all three and not 40K each because holy crap.

40K a year per child not an usually large amount of money to pay for a top ranked private school in many states.

But yes, this is all pretty stupid. My kids go to a public high school ranked in the top 10 in a demographically "desirable" county in my state and are turning out fine. Just get your kids into a good school district, stay engaged in their personal lives and what's happening at school, and the rest will work itself out.

For comparison, the average Catholic(best ranked school system in the US) high school tuition nationwide is around $10k, public high schools in the US average around $19k in per student spending, no correlation between spending and outcomes.

For common denominator education, I'd guess $10k a kid is pretty close to the minimum.

In the area I grew up in the Catholic schools at still at 8k per head, and this is a state with heavy regulation of even those. If you had a good regulatory environment I suspect you could get very competent schooling at around the 2-3k per head number.

Only if the schools were subsidized by the parish. If a school had to stand on its own two feet, $3,000 per head wouldn’t be sufficient to cover the costs of teachers’ salaries, staff salaries (janitor, cook, librarian, secretary, etc.), benefits, utilities, maintenance, insurance, books, supplies, equipment, furniture, and so on. You could probably get by with $3,000 a head if you were running some sort of homeschool co-op with no facility costs.

I suppose a "good regulatory environment" is one where the nuns can teach for cheap, the children can bring their own lunches, and any children who don't do well under those circumstances can go to public school instead at much higher cost to the state. If there are still enough nuns.

public high schools in the US average around $19k in per student spending, no correlation between spending and outcomes.

Is that true across public schools? I've often wondered if the extra funding thrown at Title 1 schools that typically underperform actually makes the correlation negative, but I've never found an actual dataset.

Abbott districts in New Jersey are one of the best sources of data for this. They're funded at (or higher than) the wealthiest districts in the state but still have dismal outcomes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbott_district

I think high spending high performance blue states throw the correlation into something too crazy to be a correlation.

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