How much does public education cost? You will probably be surprised!

Friedman 2014 Education Survey

The 2014 version of The Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice’s annual public survey is out, and I will be spending some time over the next few days going through some of the findings.

But, let’s start right out by going for the gold – or at least the large amount of money – that we are spending to educate students in US public schools. If you are like the typical American Friedman surveyed, you probably are going to be surprised.

This graphic shows a breakdown of how much money people in the Friedman survey thought we were spending per pupil on public education.

Friedman 2014 American Estimates of School Spending Per Pupil

For example, 26 percent of the respondents to the survey thought we were spending less than $4,000 per pupil and 23 percent thought we were spending somewhere between $4,001 and $8,000 per pupil. Another 14 percent thought we were spending between $8,001 and $12,000 per student. Those respondents were all wrong.

In the report, Friedman says the total expenditure per student in the 2010-11 school term was $12,215. I was able to update that by a year thanks to the US Census Bureau’s release a few weeks ago of the annual Public Education Finances report for the 2012 year.

Let’s see how that matches up against what Americans think they are spending on education.

• Nearly two out of three (63 percent) of the respondents under-estimated the costs of public schooling.

• Nearly half (49 percent) estimated the costs low by more than $4,000 per student.

• More than one in four respondents was way off on the low side. Fully 26 percent (more than one in four) need to increase their estimated cost range by more than 300 percent to approach the true costs.

By the way, Friedman says on Pages 10 and 11 of their report that having the right information changes the percentages of the public who think school funding is “too low.” Friedman says 56 percent of those who don’t know the real funding facts think school funding is “too low.” If given information about per pupil funding, only 47 percent thought the amount being spent was “too low.” I suspect if the respondents had been given the more recent figures shown in the graphic above, the percentage would have shrunk some more.

One last note: according to the new US Census report (Page 28), enrollment in the US was 48,212,483 in 2012. Getting the cost of schooling wrong by $4,000 per student is a surprise tax bill at some level (local, state or federal) of $192,849,932,000. That’s $192.8 billion. Wow! That’s lots of billions of dollars of education spending that nearly half the nation does not know about!

Next, we’ll look at what respondents told Friedman about the public school performance for all of that investment