>Almost all high-quality early learning programs, including all of the programs featured in this paper with outcomes that stick, have teacher- child ratios of 2:20 or better.
I think the elephant in the room, however, is the enormous wealth transfer needed to provide the necessary home environment for a child to succeed at a similar level to children who do have homes conducive to academic education.
Thank you, I’m on the clock but first impressions from the first few pages: this does not appear to be a document detailing the cost of a basic education, this appears to cover supplementary programs.
Fine if that’s what you want to discuss, but not pertinent to the high cost and low quality of a basic K-12 education provided by public schools. These types of programs are more suited for a social services budget.
So here is what I have been looking at all these years: my State’s K12 budget[1] and student body[2].
You don’t need a Gates Foundation report to see this information, it’s all public, and searchable, and has been for a very long time.
Per pupil spending[3] includes capital, materials, labor and any other operating costs including public debt. School districts, at least in my State, tend to finance their buildings through bonds and own them outright, so they’re not paying rent but they are making regular debt payments on at least some of their facilities.
So when you look at what is allocated in the State budget which includes non-State sources, the Cal Department of Education was allocated about $91B and change divided across a State student body of about 6M and change, 6.7M if you include charter school students, for per-pupil spend of about $13K and change, ~7Kish from the State. The non-State sources are mostly Federal from my recollection, I’m typing this on the fly and don’t have time to double check hence my liberal use of rounding, but not necessarily so.
This does not include funds raised by the school districts themselves (see [2] for how many of those there are) nor contributions from local governments which sometimes but not necessarily so contribute to the district funds.
If you want to do some back of the envelope math yourself, I’ve given you the basics, you can find the equivalents for your own State of choice on your own, and figure out if there isn’t a better way to effectively allocate what already exists. Chromebooks didn’t exist the first time I did this exercise, but the existence of very cheap laptops has brought this figure down over time. It’s both fun and depressing!
