Hot Takes on Education and Cost
The United States spends roughly $995 billion per year on K-12 public education. Of course, all of that money ultimately comes from taxpayers because the government does not
produce anything on its own. When you break down the numbers, the cost per student to attend public school is roughly $18,000 per year, and that is actually a conservative estimate.
The average cost of private K-12 education, meanwhile, is about $14,900 per year. Yes, those numbers are correct. Technically speaking, private education is cheaper than public education.
Private school students generally perform about one grade level above public school students, and even that comparison is generous to the public education system. In many cases, private school students perform multiple grade levels above their public school counterparts. So why should we keep public education at all? Stop the taxes, let families keep their money, and let private education run rampant. The numbers certainly make it look like a good
idea.
And perhaps it is.
However, some eggs would be broken while making this omelet.
If public schools were pushed aside, some children would inevitably be lost in the shuffle and receive little to no education. Private institutions would likely raise prices because demand
would increase. Regulation would become more difficult to enforce. Certain schools would hyper-focus on sports, the arts, mathematics, or literature while allowing other subjects to drift into obscurity.
But even if all of that happened, would it really be worse than what we are doing now?
I think not.
Many students leave public high schools barely able to read and with limited opportunities ahead of them. Private schools have always specialized in certain areas, whether athletics, academics, or the arts. Prices would likely rise initially, but higher prices would also create opportunity. More homeschool co-ops, private tutoring programs, charter schools, micro-schools, and independent educational models would emerge. Over
time, the market would likely level itself out.
An entirely privatized educational industry would develop, offering different solutions based on what families in a particular area actually want and need.
Those who can afford more will always have an educational advantage. That is simply a fact of life. Yet if responsibility for education
shifted away from government bureaucracies and back toward families, communities, churches, and local organizations, it is difficult to imagine an outcome that is not a net positive for society.
The unfortunate reality is that this is probably a pipe dream. The leviathan of federal and state governments is no more likely to surrender control of education than it is to surrender control of the
military.
Still, if enough families abandon the traditional school system in favor of homeschooling, tutoring, private schools, and alternative educational models, then meaningful reform may eventually be forced upon the public sector.
What is really fascinating about these numbers is how unnecessary much of modern K-12 education actually
appears to be.
I know that statement is shocking, and it deserves some explanation.
Research generally suggests that once a person can read well and perform basic mental math, they possess the tools necessary to learn almost anything. Their interests and passions can then guide them toward worthwhile careers and productive
lives.
This means parents should spend time reading to their children, even if it is only ten minutes a day, until the child can read independently. After that, children should spend about thirty minutes a day reading on their own. Most children can master addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division by age nine or ten with relatively little effort. After that, the real challenge becomes
directing their passions toward morally good and productive pursuits.
That is the hard part.
Keep them off screens. Take them to church. Read to them. Eat dinner together as a family. Let them spend plenty of time outdoors. This simple formula requires far less time than the roughly 14,000 hours the average child spends sitting in a
classroom between the ages of five and eighteen.
But how would employers know whom to hire if we did not have standardized public education?
In a word: interviews.
In today's digital world, employers could easily administer aptitude tests
online. Technology companies could create assessments that minimize cheating while measuring a person's problem-solving ability and knowledge of a specific field. Employers could evaluate candidates directly rather than relying on credentials that often reveal little about actual competence.
The best part about a world with less standardized schooling is that colleges would likely be forced to change
as well. Tuition would probably decrease. Admissions decisions would focus more on aptitude and ability than on years spent checking boxes inside a bureaucratic educational system.
Do not get me wrong. I think some good has come from standardized education. We learned a great deal about how to educate children and, perhaps more importantly, how not to educate them. We also helped make literacy the norm rather than the
exception.
But in the modern Western world, we have overcorrected. We have built a system that is far larger, more expensive, and more intrusive than it needs to be.
We need to refocus on what actually prepares a child for success.
If these
numbers sound harsh, consider the reality of the outcomes. According to the Nation's Report Card, only about 31% of fourth graders and 30% of eighth graders are proficient readers. In other words, roughly seven out of every ten students are not reading at what the federal government considers a proficient level. Even more concerning, roughly 40% of fourth graders and one-third of eighth graders do not even reach the Basic reading benchmark. A significant percentage of American students struggle
with fundamental reading skills such as identifying main ideas, understanding the order of events, and interpreting what they read. Whatever benchmark you choose to use, it is difficult to justify spending nearly a trillion dollars per year while producing results that should concern every parent in the country.
Again, this is probably a pie-in-the-sky idea. It may never exist for the masses. But it
already exists for individual families who choose a different path. And if enough individual families choose that path, the masses may eventually follow.
After all, could anything really be worse than spending $18,000 per child, having them sit at a desk for roughly 14,000 hours during their most formative years, and then discovering that nearly seven out of ten students still cannot demonstrate proficient reading skills? At some
point we have to ask whether the problem is a lack of money, or whether the system itself is fundamentally broken. Maybe an even better question is, can a "system" really bring out the best in our children? I am of course bias, but seeing my children play outside for hours on end and then coming inside to listen to their dad read/tell them the story of The Lord of The Rings seems immensely more beneficial than any school system I can imagine.
