Spending and educational outcomes are very loosely correlated in the US. Vermont is spending roughly as much as Mississippi, but it has vastly better educational outcomes. Baltimore spends more per student than the two combined, but its educational outcomes are abysmal.
Much of what Baltimore spends on "education" is really social services by another name. That's not necessarily a bad thing because children in bad situations really do need food, healthcare, counseling, etc in order to be able to learn effectively. But bundling all of those ancillary services into the education budget makes it hard to tell whether taxpayers are getting their money's worth.
Apparently, the food, healthcare, and counseling, as administered by Baltimore schools, are not very helpful in education, given the abysmal outcomes they produce.
Those outcomes are not reasonable goals, given the profound challenges these students face. The programs are probably inefficient (many of these services are), but your statement forgets that the bar is too high for kids suffering from abuse, starvation, homelessness, etc.
This is an argument without a limiting principle. Surely, if we spent $1M/year/student in Baltimore, and got the same results as we do now, everyone would agree that we’re not getting our money’s worth. Most likely, everyone would agree to the same effect if we spent $100k/student, and probably, $50k/student. We now spend $16k/student. How do we actually know that this is not enough, “given the profound challenges students face”? Why would we think that spending more would bring outcomes to parity with Utah, which spends $9k per student?
I would very much willing to spend more on schools in Baltimore if people proposing the bump in spend showed 1) a clear goal needing this extra money, and 2) clear proof that this goal actually has significant positive impact on educational outcomes. The reality is, however, that this extra spend is typically swallowed by cost of infrastructure improvements, hiring extra administrators and bumping teacher pay. Irrespective of whether these goals are worthy (obviously, schools needs to be heated, and teachers need to be paid), these things have basically no incremental impact on educational outcomes, so why do some places spend so much more on these, exactly? And are we pushed to spend even more than that?
