[nitrogen]

I believe I have discussed education issues on here with you in the past. Suffice it to say, I believe you are sorely mistaken.

1. Proportions of taxes can shrink or grow at any rate independent of inflation. This doesn't say that the absolute value given to education per student (and that's the measure that matters) has or has not exceeded inflation.

2. Statistics saying that e.g. yy% of students do not benefit from reduced class sizes or increased educational spending, where yy is some large double-digit number, ignore the critical exceptions to those statistics. Public education must address the worst-case outcomes, not just the average case, or those (100-yy)% of dropouts will sink into ghettos and become a significant drain on society, when most of them have the potential to be net contributors.

3. As I'm sure I've said before, talk to a few overworked, stressed-out teachers after an arduous day of dealing with students threatening them with violence, administrators not supporting them with classroom materials (try teaching math without any textbooks), etc. It's like babysitting 250 erratic 4-year-olds a day without the right toys to pacify them, except those 4-year-olds can kill you.

[mdda]

While I'm sympathetic to the plight of teachers (my mother was a physics teacher, FWIW), I still can't shake the fact that education spending per student is higher in the US than in most of the rest of the world : http://mercatus.org/publication/k-12-spending-student-oecd

Something doesn't add up.

[5hoom]

I think that looking at overall spending per-student as a metric for the quality of education is about the same as using lines-of-code as a metric for the quality of a developer.

Sure it's important, but it gives only a very small piece of the overall picture.

[rphlx]

Perhaps the real metric should be spending per administrator.