It raises the question, what are we getting for our money (in the US)?
> In 2017, the United States spent $14,100 per full-time-equivalent (FTE) student on elementary and secondary education, which was 37 percent higher than the average of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) member countries...
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd
Part of this is in having schools bearing the brunt of other failures in society or by having schools be the ones trying to solve those issues.
Schools are often the safety net for youths with a wide range of problems. While schools are the catch all for such problems, they're more expensive than fixing other issues like fair wages for the parents of the students (e.g. having hischoolers needing to get a job to support the family rather than study for school).
This high price tag is the result of shifting around other issues to the place where they're inefficiently handled.
---
The flip side of this is the "schools are often funded by property taxes and areas that are able to collect more taxes are able to spend significantly more per student even if it doesn't result in a better outcome." Many of these areas already have good student outcomes and the money is spent on on... whatever.
