James Harvey is executive director of the National Superintendents Roundtable. See their excellent report “The Iceberg Effect,” which put international comparisons of schools into a broad context.
He commented today, in response to an article claiming that we spend more than other nations and get worse results:
The “we spend more than anyone less for poorer results” argument is specious. We’d really need a forensic examination of finances to get a better fix on this, but American schools carry in their budgets hugely expensive line items for benefits and health insurance, transportation, and athletics that other nations pay for in municipal budgets or through community groups (in the case of athletics). An apples to apples comparison would either eliminate those costs from American school budgets (to get a better fix on true educational expenditures) or calculate, for schools elsewhere, equivalent contributions from outside the school system.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
What a great report! I hope all the good readers of this blog will take the time to read the executive summary. Pages 15 and 16 provide a positive, concise framework about how we should talk about education to our neighbors and policy makers.
“Celebrate the success of schools.” “Minimize alarmist rhetoric about our schools.”
On the other hand, I know of many people who, when they celebrate their schools, can only talk about the high school football or basketball team. The most egregious being in Allen, TX, where they celebrate the construction of a $70 million football stadium (http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/09/heres-what-a-usd70-million-high-school-stadium-looks-like.html) or Katy, TX, where they’re trying to keep up with the Joneses (http://usatodayhss.com/2016/new-katy-texas-stadium-now-tops-70-million-in-costs).
This report should be read by those taxpayers and voters too.
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I have not had a chance to do anything except glance at the press release very quickly. Besides things like athletics, which can be very expensive, we also expend a lot of money on the overhead costs of testing, costs which do not exist in many of the other nations. We tend to spend much more on administrative costs as a whole compared to other nations. Comparisons of costs are therefore not necessarily indicative of anything, and are certainly not indicative of the ROI on spending for INSTRUCTION. Then of course there is the fact that at least among the G-7 we have the highest proportion of our public school students being children in poverty, by far. We have about 25% so categorized. Finland by comparison, since they are included in this study, has less than 4%. We have data that demonstrates on things like PISA American students in schools with less than 10% children in poverty – more than twice the rate of Finland – actually outperform Finland.
But by now we know that a complete analysis of what data is available does NOT fit the rhetorial framework of those who want to argue that our schools are too expensive and failing, and in general want to blame teachers for that.
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The health insurance mention is particularly important. It’s frequently the fastest growing line item in school budgets, often the second most expensive (after salaries), and it simply is not carried by school districts in other countries.
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The costs for health care and teacher retirement are huge portions of school budgets, in large measure because states have shifted the burden to local school districts in some of these areas and also because health costs have risen. See the chart in this blog post:
http://www.teacherpensions.org/blog/teacher-benefits-continue-drain-district-budgets
The politicians who complain about school spending are the ones who want to strip benefits from “takers”, practice “resentment politics” by bashing publicly funded employee benefit packages, and who adamantly oppose any kind of universal health care that would ultimately enable school districts to shed some of the costs.
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