ENORMOUS AMOUNTS OF MONEY FLOW INTO THE BOTTOMLESS EDUCATION PIT All in all, with various perks included, a teacher makes on average $68.85 an hour, whereas a private sector worker makes about $36 per hour. (While it’s true that the average teacher has more education than the average private sector worker, much of the added study is in our schools of education, which the late Walter Williams, a standout professor of economics at George Mason University, referred to as “the academic slums of most any college.” Also, a 2011 paper in the journal Education Policy Analysis Archives backs up Williams’ assertion, finding that education majors are subject to considerably “lower grading standards” than other college students.)
How much will increased spending really help student achievement?
Spurred by the Covid panic, schools have been the recipient of ungodly sums of money. And it’s not as if the beast was starving before. To put things into perspective, the U.S. spends about $800 billion on national defense, more than China, Russia, India, the U.K., France, Saudi Arabia, Germany and Japan combined, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. America now spends even more on k-12 education, with an outlay of about $900 billion dollars a year, which includes an additional $122 billion from the Covid-related American Rescue Plan. While we have a military that is second to none, our education spending does not lead to a similar result. Our annual education outlay is second highest in the world, trailing only Norway. But in achievement, we are in the middle of the pack. For example, the 2018 rankings by the Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA, has the U.S. 36th out of the 79 countries that participated in the math test, which is given to 15-year-olds.