[tptacek]

Three things about that stat (you'll get varying numbers for it, by the way, from different sources):

* First, obviously, it's an average (you get it by simply dividing the total budget by the total number of enrolled students) across the entirety of Chicago, which is a huge city with schools that have wildly different challenges.

* It's risen sharply in the last few years as CPS has attempted interventions of varying credibility --- for instance, by drastically expanding the number of school counselors. So it's not really accurate to say that CPS has tried the experiment of spending $30k/student and arrived at this outcome; the jury isn't yet out on it. More than $10k of the "per student cost" probably falls into that bucket.

* Something like 15% of this expense is pension. That's bad, but it's not really a policy lever CPS has to play with, either.