My first thought on hearing that was “that’s because we don’t have hugely bloated school districts like the Los Angeles Unified School District.”  I attended junior high and high school in that district, and at that time something on the order of half their employees were administrators.  My high school math teacher, who loved teaching, eventually became one because there was no other way to get ahead.  He spearheaded the introduction of a statistics course to our high school, only to have the teaching of the course taken from him and handed over at the last minute to a guy whose idea of adequate pedagogy was writing the assignment on the board and going to sleep.  This “teacher” got the course because of some rules about how many classes of what type any teacher could have, or something like that—rules that were made up by some administrators with nothing better to do than to make up stupid rules.  The whole system was a total ripoff and it discouraged anyone from actually teaching.  Why anyone would want to applaud spending extra money on something like that is beyond me.

My second thought was that Utah’s actual per-pupil spending is low because unlike a lot of other states, we don’t waste a lot of money on expensive boondoggles like putting a laptop computer in every lap.  Universal possession of laptops has, to my admittedly limited knowledge, never been proven to increase test scores or any other metric of school success.  It has, however, been proven to require hiring of teams of personnel to maintain the computers and police them for porn, pirated files, and other illicit uses, as well as the nightmare involved in giving anything fragile and expensive to children.  Do we really need to buy a brand-new math curriculum when the one we’ve got is only a couple years old?  A lot of states seem to think they do, to keep up with “changes” in math.  How much can arithmetic change in a couple of years?  I’ve read American Mathematical Monthly for several years, and I’ve never once seen an article on research into new ways to do long division or fractions.  Maybe it’s being published in other, more prestigious mathematical journals?

My third thought was that a goodly proportion of what actually gets spent on each pupil in Utah doesn’t get tallied in the state budget.  As a Utah parent in contact with other Utah parents, I’d estimate that a third to a half of Utah schoolchildren are getting additional instruction at home.  Why would Utah spend millions on music education, when parents already put their kids in private lessons?  Would they need to bother teaching kids to read when parents are already doing it?  How about the hundreds of dollars being spent on private math tutoring?  I know that sort of thing is going on all the time; I’m the one they pay hundreds of dollars to.  My own daughter is enrolled in a public school, but she’s getting about half of her meaningful learning done at home under my tutelage.  If I weren’t a teacher, I’d have to be paying somebody else to do the job.

My fourth and final thought is that per-pupil spending on a state-by-state comparison basis means next to nothing.  The cost of living varies so widely from state to state that it’s not really appropriate to line Utah’s per-pupil spending up against, say, California’s and say “see, California’s is higher!”  Well yeah, California teachers have to be paid enough to live in California houses, buy California food, and pay California utilities.  Utah real estate is something on the order of half the price (or less) of equivalent California real estate; food, natural gas, and power are all cheaper in Utah.  You’d expect Utah’s expenditures on schools (of which a large chunk is salaries, and another significant chunk is utilities and real estate) to be a heck of a lot less than California’s.

Sarah Natividad lives with her husband and four children in Utah, where she teaches math at the post-secondary level and runs a small business.  She can be found blogging at Organic Baby Farm.