Title: California’s K-12 spending exceeds $20,000 per pupil | California Policy Center
Headings: California’s K-12 spending exceeds $20,000 per pupil
California’s K-12 spending exceeds $20,000 per pupil
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Content: If you hired an absolutely first rate teacher at the very competitive rate of $150,000 per year in pay and benefits, for a ten month school year you would still have more than $15,000 per month for other expenses. Isn’t that enough to rent a classroom, buy books, and share costs for a few administrative staff? Perhaps this explains why charter schools now attract 10 percent of California’s K-12 students. $10,000 per year per student – or $12,143 per year per student, as the case may be – is enough to build an effective educational business model. This amount, around $12,000 per year per pupil, gets batted around a lot in the media. A Google search on the sum $12,143, paired with search terms “per pupil in California” yields first page citations in Patch , Times of San Diego , Orange County Register , Governing, and others including the prestigious Public Policy Institute of California. But even proponents of increasing spending per pupil acknowledge this number is low. As Larry Sand documents in a recent California Policy Center article, “After a six-day teacher strike in January 2019, the district and union settled on a contract that many questioned. Now, a year later, LAUSD officials admit that they spend $18,788 per student. But in a mid-January interview with EdSource, school superintendent Austin Beutner indicated that the district gets just $16,402 from the state to educate each child.”