The Great American Public Education Monster

Public school is a gigantic part of American life -- both in size and in cost. For example, it has been estimated that there are between 85 and 90 million elementary, middle, and high school students in the U.S., and that enormous horde of young people is enrolled in approximately 210,000 public or private schools and home school groups. Of course, as of 2007, about 2.6 million of these students are home-schooled and 15.1 million of these students are attending private and church-run schools. Do the math, however, and you will discover that this means that there is a vast army of about 70 million public school students in the U.S., and what that means is that roughly 30 percent of the 245 million people living in the United States are public school students. In other words, three out of every ten human beings in the U.S. are public school students! The cost of educating so many students is also truly huge. Thousands of school buildings that accomodate on average about 400 students (but in some cases serve as many as 4,000 students or as few as 40 or 50 students ), the salaries of hundreds of thousands of teachers and other school workers, school buses and school bus drivers, athletic facilities, classroom supplies, textbooks, library books, computers and various other kinds of electronic equipment -- all of these things and more bring the average cost per American public school student to almost $4,000 per year. That's a total of approximately $280,000,000,000 per year for public education in the U.S. That numerical amount reads "280 billion dollars," and that's more than a quarter of a trillion dollars of the taxpayers' money. One can only hope that such a large and expensive monster is being well-managed so that it will accomplish good things for the young people of America.