Spend more on schools in poor districts that badly need it | James Rosen glaring spending gap

The U.S. spends $20,387 per student, fourth most in the world. Only Luxembourg, Norway and Austria — small countries with populations under 10 million — invest more. 

Total education spending is 5.8% of our gross domestic product, compared with an average of 4.7% of GDP in dozens of other North American and European nations. 

But this superficial view distorts the key question of whether we spend enough to educate our young people. The truth? We spend more than enough in some wealthy enclaves, and far too little in many poor school districts, concentrated in rural areas and impoverished urban centers. 

You need to look at education spending in each state. And because schools get so much of their funding from local property taxes, the focus shifts from education priorities to real estate values. 

Among the 10 states plus the District of Columbia that spend the most per pupil, six have the highest median residential property values: Hawaii, the District of Columbia, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Hampshire and Rhode Island. And most states that skimp on education funding, with Mississippi and Oklahoma in the bottom five, have relatively low home prices.

The spending gaps among school districts in each state are even more glaring. The biggest disparity is in New York, where rich districts in Westchester County and on Long Island spend three times more than poor urban districts and poor rural districts in upstate New York and the Adirondacks. 

Pennsylvania, Illinois and Massachusetts have smaller but still significant spending gaps between their wealthiest and poorest school districts.

America spends too much on K-12 schools | Erika Sanzi

These huge gaps within states help explain why some that spend a lot on education still get average or even below-average results in students’ math and reading scores. Students in the District of Columbia and Hawaii, for example, are below average despite relatively high education spending. Even though their states also rank among the top 10 in per-pupil spending, students in Vermont, Delaware and Rhode Island obtain only average test results. 

Utah, by contrast, spends the second-lowest amount per student, but ranks among the top 10 states in education achievement based on testing. Florida students perform above average, yet only eight states spend less per pupil. 

The Department of Education provides tens of billions of dollars to public schools. Trump signed an executive order in March 2025 seeking to eliminate the Department of Education, a move only Congress can make. Congress created the Education Department in 1979 at the urging of President Jimmy Carter.  

In 1994, when I was hired to work in Washington, D.C., I chose to live in Fairfax County, a Virginia suburb, because its school district was ranked among the country’s best. New teachers competed fiercely to land jobs there because starting salaries were high. The median household income in Fairfax County was $147,000, third highest in the state. Thanks to high real estate values and neighborhoods filled with professionals willing to pay high property taxes, our son received a superlative education.

Just 100 miles south of Fairfax County is Essex County. Fairfax had a population of 972,000 with a median home value of $310,978, while 20,000 people lived in Essex where the median home value was $101,600. The tax base for Fairfax schools was more than three times bigger, with many more households funding it, compared to Essex schools. Wise County was still poorer.

America's official poverty rate is historically low at 10.2%. Yet the gap between poor and rich is large.

From space and science to the internet and artificial intelligence, the U.S. has long been on the cutting edge of essential innovation. If we want to maintain that edge, we need to spend more on education and steer it to the large underfunded pockets across the country.