
Per-student spending is now over $19,000 in Washington, more than the tuition at most private schools; recent education reporting shows most of this money was wasted
Liv Finne
Washington Policy Center
School choice is on the rise across the nation. Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, just announced his support for Lifeline scholarships, a state voucher program that will allow students to use public funds to attend a private school of their choice.

If enacted, his bill will help families assigned by local officials to the lowest-performing public schools because these families will be able to choose a better alternative for their children.
Governor Shapiro’s bold initiative is the latest in a popular national trend. In just two years seven states have granted families access to universal school choice programs. The number of eligible students now stands at four million.
The idea is popular in our state too. Recent polling shows 68 percent of Washington residents support giving families access to publicly-funded Education Savings Account (ESAs) to pay for homeschooling costs or private school tuition. Among families with children that support rises to an overwhelming 78 percent.
School choice is clearly popular. But does access to choice actually benefit children? What does the research say? That data is now available. Using the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress results, a new study published in the Journal of School Choice finds that:
“…higher levels of education freedom are significantly associated with higher NAEP achievement levels and NAEP gains in all our statistical models. Our state-level index of teacher quality also correlates with NAEP scores and gains.
“This descriptive analysis supports the idea that expanding parental options in education, in all forms, is consistent with improvements in average student performance in U.S. states.”
The study also found that smaller class sizes and increases in per-pupil spending does not correlate with better education levels for children. From the study:
“The extent to which state governments regulate, along with per-pupil spending amounts and class sizes, in contrast, have no consistent association with state-level student NAEP outcomes.”
The Washington state legislature has poured billions into smaller class size initiatives and, under the McCleary court decision, massive increases in per-student spending. Per-student spending is now over $19,000, more than the tuition at most private schools. Recent education reporting shows most of this money was wasted.
At the same time, Washington ranks only 38th on the national Education Freedom Index, with particularly low rankings in access to educational choices.
Still, Washington lawmakers appear determined to protect the existing system. In the 2023 session bills to extend choice to parents were blocked in committee, even those targeted to the students most in need. Education choice is expanding in more enlightened states, but the hardline stance of our elected leaders means Washington students will likely fall farther behind.
The long COVID school shutdown showed parents the harm many students experience under the union-controlled system of public schools. A broad spectrum of the public now supports school choice, including state leaders of both parties. In Washington state our politics are deeply divided, but helping children is one topic on which we can all come together, if only our top leaders would open their minds to exciting possibilities.
Liv Finne is the director of the Center for Education at the Washington Policy Center.
Also read:
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- Importance of open government laws on display with shocking storiesJason Mercier of the Mountain States Policy Center discusses two recent stories that illustrate the lengths that some public officials will go to evade public accountability.
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- Opinion: Three keys to making sure regulations don’t suffocate citizens and the economyChris Cargill of the Mountain States Policy Center explains that whether they are at the local, state or federal level, all laws and regulations have a cost.
- Opinion: 2024 – A year for political actionNancy Churchill points out that everyday Washingtonians are experiencing runaway inflation coupled with rapidly rising taxes.
I had worked at a very exclusive wealthy school in San Jose, CA, 5 years ago. For twenty thousand a year students had the best of everything and the finest teachers. Non-GMO food and Non -GEMO vending machines. It is a Christen School. When the students graduated, they had two years of college credits accomplished upon graduating high school. Students started college as juniors. They had the finest school dances, proms, after school sports, robots club, rocket club, dance clubs, and theater arts programs. That school had 3 theaters and an entire floor for costumes and props for plays.
Over 4 thousand dollars of my property taxes go to Clark County’s failing public schools. It is disgusting what our state pays a year per student for public education. This year’s graduates lost 3 years of high school from pandemic online learning.
Home schooling or privet schools are the better choice.
Several years ago Rep Tom McClintoc wrote a letter exposing how TAXPAYER funds were squandered by the Public Schools and, especially the Teacher’s Unions. This was when the Sperminator was “governor” of California. It appears from the above Opinion that the evil collusion between the “people” in Olympia and the Teacher’s Union that our tax money is being squandered even more egregiously than the spendthrifts in California. Here’s what McClintock wrote, and, see if it makes any sense to you:
“A Modest Proposal for Saving Our Schools
By Tom McClintock
The multi-million dollar campaign paid by starving teachers’ unions has finally placed our sadly neglected schools at the center of the budget debate.
Across California, children are bringing home notes warning of dire consequences if Gov. Schwarzenegger’s scorched earth budget is approved — a budget that slashes Proposition 98 public school spending from $42.2 billion this year all the way down to $44.7 billion next year. That should be proof enough that our math programs are suffering.
As a public school parent, I have given this crisis a great deal of thought and have a modest suggestion to help weather these dark days.
Maybe — as a temporary measure only — we should spend our school dollars on our schools. I realize that this is a radical departure from current practice, but desperate times require desperate measures.
The governor proposed spending $10,084 per student from all sources. Devoting all of this money to the classroom would require turning tens of thousands of school bureaucrats, consultants, advisers and specialists onto the streets with no means of support or marketable job skills, something that no enlightened social democracy should allow.
So I will begin by excluding from this discussion the entire budget of the state Department of Education, as well as the pension system, debt service, special education, child care, nutrition programs and adult education. I also propose setting aside $3 billion to pay an additional 30,000 school bureaucrats $100,000-per-year (roughly the population of Monterey) with the proviso that they stay away from the classroom and pay their own hotel bills at conferences.
This leaves a mere $6,937 per student, which, for the duration of the funding crisis, I propose devoting to the classroom.
To illustrate how we might scrape by at this subsistence level, let’s use a hypothetical school of 180 students with only $1.2 million to get through the year.
We have all seen the pictures of filthy bathrooms, leaky roofs, peeling paint and crumbling plaster to which our children have been condemned. I propose that we rescue them from this squalor by leasing out luxury commercial office space. Our school will need 4,800 square feet for five classrooms (the sixth class is gym). At $33 per foot, an annual lease will cost $158,400. This will provide executive washrooms, around-the-clock janitorial service, wall-to-wall carpeting, utilities and music in the elevators. We’ll also need new desks to preserve the professional ambiance.
Next, we’ll need to hire five teachers — but not just any teachers. I propose hiring only associate professors from the California State University at their level of pay. Since university professors generally assign more reading, we’ll need 12 of the latest edition, hardcover books for each student at an average $75 per book, plus an extra $5 to have the student’s name engraved in gold leaf on the cover.
Since our conventional gym classes haven’t stemmed the childhood obesity epidemic, I propose replacing them with an annual membership at a private health club for $39.95 per month. This would provide our children with a trained and courteous staff of nutrition and fitness counselors, aerobics classes and the latest in cardiovascular training technology.
Finally, we’ll hire an $80,000 administrator with a $40,000 secretary because — well, I don’t know exactly why, but we always have.
Our bare-bones budget comes to this:
5 classrooms $158,400
150 desks @ $130 — $19,500
180 annual health club memberships @ $480 — $86,400
2,160 textbooks @ $80 $172,800
5 C.S.U. associate professors @ $67,093 — $335,465
1 administrator $80,000
1 secretary $40,000
24 percent faculty and staff benefits $109,312
Offices, expenses and insurance $30,000
TOTAL $1,031,877
This budget leaves a razor-thin reserve of just $216,703, or $1,204 per pupil, which can pay for necessities like paper, pencils, personal computers and extra-curricular travel. After all, what’s the point of taking four years of French if you can’t see Paris in the spring?
The school I have just described is the school we’re paying for. Maybe it’s time to ask why it’s not the school we’re getting.
Other, wiser, governors have made the prudent decision not to ask such embarrassing questions of the education-industrial complex because it makes them very angry. Apparently the unions believe that with enough of a beating, Gov. Schwarzenegger will see things the same way. Perhaps. But there’s an old saying that you can’t fill a broken bucket by pouring more water into it.
Maybe it’s time to fix the bucket.”
Of course, the real enemy in all of this is the voters, NOT the villans in Olympia. It’s the VOTERS that put these creatures in power in Olympia. Think about what $19,000.00 per student would buy now……