On the surface, it seems the United States spends a lot on public education — more per student than all but a few countries.

Nationwide, 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 public-education spending is 5.59 percent of our gross domestic product, compared with an average of 4.61% of GDP in the 66 other North American and European nations.

However, as with all analysis, 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 the far more numerous poor school districts nationwide, concentrated in rural areas and impoverished urban centers.

True to our federalist system of government, you need to look at education spending in each state. And because education spending is funded mainly by local property taxes in almost every state, this view shifts the focus 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 within each state are even more glaring. The biggest disparity is in New York, where rich districts in Westchester County and on Long Island spend $75,000 per student — 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.

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 on proficiency exams. 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.

Last year, the Department of Education provided $45 billion to public schools, about 12 percent of its total funding. In his 2024 campaign, President Trump vowed to eliminate the department, a decades-long goal of conservative politicians and think tanks. President Ronald Reagan pledged to dismantle the department in his 1982 State of the Union address to Congress, and subsequent Republican Party presidential platforms have contained the same goal. Congress created the Education Department in 1979 at the urging of President Jimmy Carter, fulfilling one of his major 1976 campaign promises.

Trump said American public schools are “ranked 40 out of 40” in educational outcomes compared with other countries, but “ranked No. 1 in cost per pupil.” As FactCheck.org showed, both claims were wrong. Among 38 advanced democratic countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, American students rank sixth in reading, 12th in science and 28th in math. Japan has the highest average ranking across the three disciplines.

Trump signed an executive order in March 2025 seeking to eliminate the Department of Education, a move only Congress can make. In typical Trump fashion, he signed a budget bill this year allocating $79 billion to the department, more than it has ever received. Also in Trump fashion, he is using the extra money to sue and otherwise target school districts with policies protecting transgender students.

At the same time, Education Secretary Linda McMahon has slashed the staff of the department’s Office of Civil Rights, which Congress established to combat discrimination at public schools based on race, color, national origin, sex, disability or age. Under her leadership, the office dismissed 90% of 9,000 complaints it received between March and October last year, a Government Accountability Office report found.

In 1994, the Raleigh News & Observer made me its Washington correspondent covering the federal government. I chose to live in Fairfax County, a Virginia suburb, for one reason: Its school district was ranked among the country’s best. I learned that new teachers competed fiercely to land a job there because the starting salary was $40,000 — $90,000 in today’s dollars. 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 in subsequent years.

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, than the basis for Essex schools. Wise County was still poorer, with an economy more like Kentucky just across the border than most of Virginia.

The country’s official poverty rate is 10.2%, among the lowest rates ever. Yet income inequity — the gap between poor and rich — is the biggest in modern history.

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 in the decades to come, we need to spend more on education and steer it to the large underfunded pockets across the country.

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ABOUT THE WRITER

James Rosen is a former political reporter and Pentagon correspondent for McClatchy who has received awards from the National Press Club, Military Reporters and Editors, and the Society of Professional Journalists, which in 2021 named him top opinion columnist. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.

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