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U.S. Education Spending and Performance vs. The World [INFOGRAPHIC]

February 8th, 2011 by

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We’ve put together this infographic that compares the United States’ education spend and performance versus eleven countries.  The U.S. is the clear leader in total annual spending, but ranks 9th in Science performance and 10th in Math.

During the most recent State of the Union Address, President Obama put out the call to “prepare 100,000 new teachers in the fields of science and technology and engineering and math.”  While the need is there to improve student performance in these subjects, the question remains: Are Americans ready to rise to the occasion?

How much does annual spending per child impact educational outcomes?  What role will teachers play in improving math and science scores?  Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments below and share this infographic with others.

U.S. Education versus the World via Master of Arts in Teaching at USC

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  • Lewagner

    What was the measure used to compare the countries in their math and science performance?

    • Lukejf01

      Pretty sure it the SAT Reasoning Tests in those areas.

      • Iowehfw

        PISA

  • Orlando36

    A blanket percentage of 33.7% of population is school age for any country? That’s a statistically ridiculous calculation. The birth rate in Japan is 7.41 births per thousand, while in the US it is 13.83 per thousand, nearly double. The average age of a resident of Japan is 44.6, while in the US it is 36.8. There is a higher percentage of school age children in the US than in Japan. Without the real numbers, the cost per student calculation is meaningless.

    • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=698295684 Hellmut Lotz

      Yes, that’s ridiculous.

    • Southelitegurl

      actually they calculate the cost per student by asking the countries, its not by how many students live in the country, the cost per student can be found out by looking into the government funding and where they seperate it. They dont “calculate” how much they spenc, its just a known fact

  • Matt E

    Nice work, this is a great way to explain the data.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=698295684 Hellmut Lotz

    Did you control for comparative buying power? This comparison seems specious. A dollar in the USA is not a dollar in Finland or Sweden.

  • Acmehuang

    American people enjoy a much better system, and have more talented teachers; teachers are devoted and accommodating. People vote for the American system and way of life by emigrating from other parts of the globe to the US.

  • Cincybearcatfan

    What is the comparison between the expenditure for education vs. the total expenditures of that country?  That would be more helpful.  Is the US spending more or less, compared to total expenditures, than the other countries listed?

    • Nagasakisue

      I just looked that up. As a percentage of GNP, the US is 37th in education figures, or was in 2002. Cuba was first.

      • justin

        source?

  • Elle

    What is the meaning of the overlap between the balloons?  This would imply to a statistician that there is some covariance between the overlapping countries’ performances. 

    Also, the size of the balloons is misleading.  The first bar graph correctly shows the relative spending by the different countries because it shows per capita spending.  The U.S. per-capita spending is about 33% higher than that of the United Kingdom, but the relative size of the balloons would draw the reader’s attention to the raw figures, which don’t take into account the size of the population. 

    • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1641917367 Timothy J. Grossano

       Thank you. Yes. Best comment of them all, by far. Good critical eye. Next questions are, how is the money being allocated, and where is the waste? It may not be accurate to blame the spending on teachers, and teachers unions.

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_BPZ6GNKJPSWWWFL56VSF5NDIEI Brenda Brenda

    I admit, I have not been on this webpage in a long time. however it was another joy to see It is such an important topic and ignored by so many, even professionals.

    Golfkurse

  • Lynne

    Regardless of how confusing/misleading the presentation of this information is, the US is failing educationally.  Parents are largely involved in not setting standards and expectations for their kiddos.  Teachers alone can’t get a kid to want to learn unless it is supported by the family.  I suspect an ethnically heterogeneous population is also a problem in that there are so many different levels of expectation and experience within those ethnicities.  Compare this to Finland where parental expectations are very very similar from family to family.  Just a thought.

    • Magic shoebox

      Ethnic diversity creates variety among a group and as such they become highly adaptive to new and changing environments, giving the group a distinct competitive advantage over the homogenous group. This quality has created vast opportunities in America and continues to be a competitive advantage in the world market. Sadly many Americans no longer have a commitment to leveraging America’s unique competitive advantage and seem more interested in making political hay out of humanity’s tendencies to be suspicious of groups that differ from their own.

  • Autumn Roodbeen

    One: The graphic is crazy looking. I understand what it is trying to get across that as supposedly one of the world leaders, who spend much more than many countries on each student, the U.S. is behind other countries in their testing. But do we really need new teachers trained in those areas? Wouldn’t it make sense to train the teachers who are already in the classroom to up their standards. Just because something may be a little broken doesn’t mean we should replace all the parts. Perhaps just a tune up is in order.

    • cinforest62

      Tune up the teacher? – Excuse me, but how about lets tune up the system so that there is accountability on all ends and not just on ours (the teacher’s)? Do you know how many hours are spent on remediation during and after the school day with students whose parents know what they are supposed to be doing to help but then nothing gets done at home? Many of us do have very high standards for our students but our work gets in the way of all the soccer practices, music and dance lessons or the fact that it might be the other parent’s night with the child – so, how could any work or studying get done? As a primary school teacher, we are not allowed to give these students a “0″ but provide more opportunity for them to get the work done.
      So, until you have walked in our shoes, don’t make comments putting more blame on the classroom teacher. We are done with No Child Left Behind and having to allow all of the outrageous behaviours to exist in our classrooms because parents don’t know how to set boundaries and teach respect for the classroom.
      Sore point, why yes, it is!

  • mimi

    Yes, the data is confusing and possibly misleading in many areas. However, I am sure that this information can be substantiated in many other studies.  The question then becomes how are the educational expenditures being allocated in the US vs Other Nations.  How are our dollars being spent within our infrastructure as compared to other countries.

  • Ana

    so Finland rocks

    • mimi

      Sad to say, but; it looks that way

  • Sbivins0904

    Like others, I wonder where the money is being spent. It appears that the U.S. is spending so much money on education than other countries. Unfortunately, the chart demonstrates that other countries are doing better with less money. Another issue that I agree with is the fact that teaching should begin in the home. Teachers are asked to wear so many hat, and they are held accountable for so much. Parents need to be held accountable for their children, and they need to keep in mind that their children may behave in a different way at school than they do at home.

  • Anonymous

    Maybe we’re wasting money on teachers when we should be spending more on the home. I’ve more than a sneaking suspicion that kids growing up in an overstressed environment are going to reflect that stress in their academic performance.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=676054853 Luke Luther

    Schools use supplies, have food expenditures, maintenance and upkeep.  Is all this taken into account?  Do the Finnish schools have the same amount of overhead costs?  Who pays for the books and education materials the students use?  What is the real cost analysis for comparing the schools across the board?

  • Angelina Stela

    It is little confusing but it is shown that expenditure in US is highest in education and though in litaracy level on third position. This show that there is lake of some factor in education system of US.
    automotive mechanic training

    • Magics Shoebox

      See my above post and it explains the source of the lake that is drownig our public  education system

  • http://sameerkhansblog.blogspot.com/ Sameer Khan

    Nice infographics !! Best part to notice is that US spends highest and gets very less as per the industry standards. It simply highlights the importance of the immigrants to US and their contribution in their technological development.

    I think India should also be included in this chart.

    Sameer Khan’s BLOG

    • alan

      Sameer,
           Though I do appreciate the hard work and intelligence of our Indian Scince Imports, I do not agree with the impotence of immigrants to the US and their contributions. Most of the immigrants are illegal and drain our systems, not improve them.

      • Sailuralan

        That should have been Science and importence. I R edumakated!

      • http://shapeuplife.com/ Sameer Khan

        Well I have been to US but I know what kind of people go from to US. And they are not unskilled and stupid people.

  • Firedeptmusic

    Im Pretty Sure that not many countries are building 60 million dollar high school football stadiums like they do in texas and that all goes into those education numbers.

    http://www.digtriad.com/news/story.aspx?storyid=173657

  • Magic Shoebox

    How much of this is spent on actual instruction vs new textbooks, new testing programs, new assessment modules? As a parent I watch teachers and parents advocate for small classrooms, but what we get instead is a new assessment program or a new achievement test, which brings with it new textbooks and new experts to teach school districts how to perform better. But what we don’t get is more teachers, smaller class sizes, and more engagement in the classroom.  But then teachers and parents don’t have lobbyist and sales reps explaining all the joys and benefits of small classrooms. They aren’t wining and dining the school board or the state congress with slick pamphlets with cool graphs demonstrating  how effective these latest assessment programs, textbooks and modules work. And besides, this new program will create new jobs and a new industry, so it will work. Of course the hiring more teachers would create more jobs too. But they don’t work for as cheap as those printers in China and the big executives can’t increase their companies marketshare unless their is some new, great product to sell. And since the Civil War you can’t buy people and rent them out so there is not corporate profit in just hiring more teachers.  So instead of doing what teachers and parents know will work, we do what is best for our corporate system. We create jobs. We create a new market for new educational resources, but they really don’t solve the problem because if they did, the educational resources publishing and manufacturing industry wouldn’t have new products to sell, so school districts would not have to buy new, expensive programs and as a result, some guy in China wouldn’t have a job. So the system doesn’t really do much for education, but it sure does create a lot of economic activity.  And isnt’ that how we measure everything in the USA anymore, by the amount of private sector economic activity it creates?

    • Blangmaack

      omg yes you definitely are onto something here….  I beleive that we should be looking at what we already have that WORKS for our students and USE IT not replace it!  Teachers are asked to change, try, invent, create, and even pay for all these NEW ideas and what we really want to do is teach to our students how to learn using the skills we have aquired as teachers/parents and productive citizens to help our students learn.  Really we need to focus on what already exists and works for us to help them.  I also think that there is waaaaay to much emphasis put on testing and teaching to the test.  TEACH TO THEY LEARN even if you don’t get to every part of that test.  If it was up to me I would eliminate test grading should be understanding

    • OldMan

       Spoken like a true Liberal. Blame education on business. I lay more blame on grading on curves,  affirmative action, and relaxed standards to allow less than capable students an edge up. When you do that, you wind up with a less than capable graduate and a less than capable teacher. Maybe they are more likely to buy into commercial hype than someone who had to make it on their own without any of those “advantages.”

      Furthermore, when you add tenure, and teacher unions ( two mechanisms solely designed to protect bad teachers, in my opinion), we wind up with even more less than capable students. It’s a spiraling cycle downward exactly like we are seeing.  In my business it’s called garbage in equals garbage out.

      We need to learn in this country that most of the time when you give someone a break it doesn’t help them, it hurts all of us. There is no way to homogenize society without lowering the common denominator of standards for all of us. If you want to increase our ratings in education you need to set the bar high. Sure some won’t make it. That’s life. We’re not all cut out to be brain surgeons and rocket scientists but we do need some of them.

  • Fairlydiscreet

    The science score could be lowered by including Intelligent Design I guess.

  • Kshap24

    What about China? Include 12 countries but can’t add China, a contending global super power?

    • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_6CYJ2EAVJWJGDHHI4ZJCJ6RZKE Matt

      Chinese guy ^

  • Peiceofpie

    Add a citation so i can cite this source

  • Omar Ismail

    I actually don’t think education is failing according to this. You’re just bigger… as a % GDP/Capita, you’re spending about as much as Mexico. 

    Using some crude assumptions here:
    Mexico pay their average wage per 7 students.
    You pay the US average wage per 6 students. 

    As a result you’re doing substantially better. 

    Now Finland is winning, so lets look at them. Finland have almost identical spending to you (US wage per 6.1, Fin wage per 6.2), so now yeah, you need to improve, but keep in mind US education spending has only recently jumped to those levels too. 

    I mean this is showing things accurately. I just think it could be put a little more into context than what it is.

    Historical funding > Current funding.
    Vs average wage might be a better indicator than just outright spend.

  • http://www.carpetcleaningreno.net/ Reno carpet cleaning

    This could be one particular of the most beneficial blogs We have ever arrive across on this subject.

  • http://twitter.com/visionpresident Christopher Hagen

    The conclusion on the issue of education is clear and, surprise, surprise, it’s the same conclusion we must make with any government program — they don’t work well and, in practice, eventually bankrupt us.  We must move away from a Government monopoly on education and promote charter schools and competition to best educate our children.  Private enterprise is the “American Way” for a reason — because it works.  So long as we have a government monopoly of our education system, we will never accel, it’s as simple as that.  Good money spent on the wrong answer does not yield good results.  Tax all you want, but that isn’t the right answer.  Yours in Faith for a better America and a better world.  http://www.visionpresident.com

  • bttab

    As with any blanket stat, you need to look deeper to understand what is happening.  US spending is high because it includes all the exclusive, expensive private schools.  Finland has no private schools to speak of.  So, it’s interesting to compare *public* education spending instead:  The US and Finland are about on par.  And yet Finland greatly “outperforms” — but careful, because that’s global performance, which would include the privately schooled US students in the comparison.  That says that the US public schools perform even worse compared to Finnish public schools. 

    So what’s going on?  It’s all about income inequality.  The US measure of inequality (the GINI coeff) is about twice that of Finland.  So, we have many more poor people, and poverty suppresses scholastic performance.  Moreover, the effect is amplified when poverty persists over generations, and when it is geographically segregated — poor neighborhoods vs. rich.  The result is schools that systematically underperform.  The best students and teachers flee.  And no amount of spending on the schools themselves can correct the problem, because they are embedded in a larger context that will always suppress performance.  Add lots of these to your (US) average, and the numbers go down. 

    The birds-eye view, then, is a comparison between an egalitarian society (Finland) and the everyman-for-himself US culture.  Fins value an egalitarian society so much that they are willing to pay for it with higher taxes.  Americans universally want taxes lowered, no matter what the current level may be, so that they can individually pocket more.  (Voting records substantiate this.)  Fins think “We”, and Americans think “Me”.  The resulting societal costs in the States are high, with this issue of educational performance among them.  (Violent crime is another.)  So, yes, Finland rocks, as someone said here, no so much because of their particular school policies but because of the generally greater equality among Fins, which breeds all kinds of advantages — better schooling, safer society, and more. 

    • CJ

      The problem is not that fins think “we” and Americans think “me” … The problem is in this country destroying the work ethic, the dream to succeed, because due to our cultural mix, everyone is afraid of offending the other, so the good beliefs, ones that are positive, that work….. Are destroyed in this country. So what does this prove? I think we can deduce
      It for ourselves.

    • CJ

      The problem is not that fins think “we” and Americans think “me” … The problem is in this country destroying the work ethic, the dream to succeed, because due to our cultural mix, everyone is afraid of offending the other, so the good beliefs, ones that are positive, that work….. Are destroyed in this country. So what does this prove? I think we can deduce
      It for ourselves.

      • SDC

         Japan is an overwhelmingly polite culture. Much more so that in the U.S., but if you check the stats they are about even with Americans. While the culture of political correctness can serve to suppress, I don’t think it’s too much to ask people to be culturally sensitive, especially if you are a member of the dominant majority who knows nothing of real oppression (I’m a straight, Caucasian male, by the way). Being sensitive to other cultures, I think is better than being fearful, hateful, dismissive and even violent. It may not be the solution, but it’s certainly not the problem.

    • Jack

      States could still allocate spending better than our federal government could. There would be a greater sense of unity amongst citizens to pay for education within their respective state borders because the system would be more transparent. We could more easily see the disconnect between spending and performance if the greater responsibilities were localized. Decentralizing power largely decentralizes money, which would coincide with the egalitarian views you bring up, as well.

      • http://www.facebook.com/people/Jenny-Hrvatska/729516958 Jenny Hrvatska

         Jack, I’m not sure what you are referring to with regard to allocating spending and the federal government. While school districts receive money from both the federal and state governments, in most cases state funding dwarfs federal funding. Most decisions about how to spend that money is made locally. In NY state people vote on school budgets every year. If they approve spending increases they’re well aware that they’ll see a tax increase.  This is true in many other states as well.

    • http://www.facebook.com/people/Jenny-Hrvatska/729516958 Jenny Hrvatska

       Public schools in NY state spend an average of $15K per year per student.  I live in a small, not terribly well off rural school district in central NY.  Like all the other school districts around here our budget is about $15k per student.  The state with the lowest average spending per student is Utah, which spends about as much as Germany.  It’s not like private education is any cheaper in the US. Private schools cost even more, and when you factor out variables like demographics and family income of the students, they don’t perform any better. Whether it’s public or private schools, the US pays more and gets less.  This is a cultural problem that goes beyond income inequality or whether government can provide services more efficiently than private industry. 

    • Anonymous

      I dont think it is fair to compare a country of 5.6 mln people w/a country the size of the United States.  I agree w/some of your comments, especially when poverty hits the second generation. 

      I do think the only way to improve will be through a cultural change in the poverty areas.  There are many success stories but regretably far too many failures. 

      How about if family receiving govt funding, you will receive a ‘bonus’ if your child receives 90% score, I dont know, but current system is not working.

      • Dalelittle

         I think the current system is not working because too much time is spent on teaching things like cultures, ideology and other issues and evidently, not enough time teaching math and science.

        • http://twitter.com/TruculentSheep Truculent Sheep

          Citations?

        • Anonymous

          Parents are spending too much time working… NOT enough time with their kids. As simple as that!

    • RTrask

      Excuses are like rectums, everyone has one. I find very little in your comments that means anything. “Oh the poor underprivileged, we can’t expect them to do well no matter how much we spend on them.” Yet that is not universally the case, and there are a number of examples where underprivileged communities have galvanized around their schools and out perform more affluent schools districts. 

      None of the factors you claim as why the Fins are succeeding and the US is failing have changed in the last 30 years, but Finland started with very lack luster academic performance and has shown consistent improvement year after year. Several states in the US have a lower ethnic diversity percentage than Finland. 30 out of 50 of the states have a population that is equal or smaller than Finland, yet there is no correlation of any of those states doing better academically because of that “advantage”.Your comments are just a bunch of demagoguery to explain away an inconvenient truth. We Americans are spending more and getting less, and until we really face that fact, we can not address the real issues.   

  • http://www.tran33m.com/vb/ منتديات

    The problem is not that fins think “we” and Americans think “me” … The problem is in this country destroying the work ethic, the dream to succeed, because due to our cultural mix, everyone is afraid of offending the other, so the good beliefs, ones that are positive, that work….. Are destroyed in this country. So what does this prove? I think we can deduce

  • DanW

    These numbers are telling you nothing.  One has to drill down.  How much of this is education?   In many urban municipalities food assistance programs, busing and other activities are lumped into education programs.  Are they in the rest of the world?

    • Dalelittle

       How much of this is education?  Evidently too much of it is spent on side issues and not enough on math an science.  The education lobby and news media keep pleading for more money so they can have more to waste on teaching their pet social and culture issues

  • Dalelittle

    I graduated high school in 1965 and while I was in school I heard how we needed more money because our education trailed other countries. In the 1970′s it was “more money”, 1980′s “more money”, 1990′s “more money”, 2000′s “more money”, 2012 “we need more money because Johnny doesn’t know how to protest effectively”.  Johnny still can’t read, but now despite all the money, Johnny can’t think for himself. We used to tell our kids that money doesn’t grow on trees.  Today’s college students and graduates believe that money does grow on trees.  They want the government to provide them with “free” stuff, and cannot comprehend that nothing is free.  They can’t comprehend that the government gets it’s finances from the people, so when the government provides something for “free” they sing the praises of big government.
    As for the growing number of poor people in this country I will note two things.  One is how “poverty” or the “poor” are defined.  The other is that, yes, the percentage of the population living in poverty is rising, but it is our moral decay that contributes greatly to that.  Our society no longer values family and more singles are having children and that has become acceptable.  Single parents and their children are then are stuck in poverty and the percentage of poor people in our society grows.  So called income equality kills the incentive to work and produce.  However, I may be wrong.  After all Finland is the greatest, most prosperous and most powerful nation on earth and unlike the U. S., people are beating the doors down to live in Finland.  In contrast, people have been fleeing the U. S. for generations and we remain an obscure country with little influence in the world.

    • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_OXIMLFJHG6SE3TU5CV7DVOZ4IM Andrew

      I guess they didn’t teach the use of the apostrophe in 1965?

      Anyway, income inequality is getting out of control. It is an extremist view that “equality kills the incentive to work.” A rational, moderate position is one that understands rich people will continue to be rich, but policies that enforce those people becoming exponentially richer while the poor suffer… those are horrible policies.

      • Adrian

        @yahoo-OXIMLFJHG6SE3TU5CV7DVOZ4IM:disqus  - Bravo!  Your ability to point out an improper use of the apostrophe proves you are much smarter than Dalelittle.

        Sorry Dalelittle, but your entire point has been rendered inconsequential.  That really sucks too, ’cause I agreed with everything you said.  Next time, punctuate properly.

        • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_OXIMLFJHG6SE3TU5CV7DVOZ4IM Andrew

          I actually had a point in my comment. I’m assuming you’re too stupid too realize this?

        • Dbruce30

          No adrian yours is. I would like to know how many people can live on proper apostrophe’s

      • Enlightened

        You are just ridiculous, how could anyone assume anything like equality would ever be possible? There is no such thing as equality, people are not equal. For there to be a true equality everyone would have to be either robotic, or have a government like North Korea, and no possessions. You are indeed a dolt, the rich will get richer, and the poor will get more poor. This is a fact, but i think there was someone who said something along the same lines as what you are trying to get at…. his name? Karl Marx. Congrats. You are officially a communist. ;)

        • Dara

          lol how do people like you ever end up on sites like these. If you read correctly he was not, in fact, supporting communism in anyway what-so-ever. Here’s a line you probably missed: ”
          So called income equality kills the incentive to work and produce”. He only mentioned that Finland’s economy and society is running a lot more smoothly than the United States. Besides Socialism and Communism aren’t the same thing buddy. I don’t understand why you would choose to back up your argument with failed governments when he gave you examples of a perfectly working one. In case you didn’t know most of the well to do countries up there have socialist institutions. Also, your grammar is horrible.  

    • angel

      i disagree with pretty much most that youve said, please do not throw my generation under the bus, we are NOT all the same. as for single parents, i will agree that the meaning & importance of family have gone completely out the window & it is sad. i will be turning 21 this year & i feel out of place with almost all my friends because they are either married or with kids & i for one value my education too much to get married or even think about having a child. but all single parents or young married parents are not the reason for the rising number of poverty.
      all im saying is dont blame us for growing up this way. some of us do value family morals & values, some of us would rather have a career at the age of 30 than have a husband with 3 kids at 30. but then again some of us would rather party it up while still young & pay for the consequences later. we may be all screwed up my generation & the generation after me, but its not ALL our fault. have you forgotten who raised us?

    • Guest

      If you go back in history the government was paying ALL of the tuition for college students I am sure when you were in school.

    • Anonymous

       How dare you. My generation doesn’t work any less diligently that your generation did. As a matter of fact, we’re doing at least as much with a lot less. Every American should have the unhindered ability to meet their optimal ability so they can contribute their best to progressing society. And how dare you mention “moral decay” while condemning the poor. You talk about valuing family, but that starts with valuing children. You can’t say you value children and complain about them wanting free higher education. And I’m very sorry that poor being defined as malnourished instead of starving to death doesn’t meet your idea of poverty. Maybe soon.

      Furthermore, I’m sick and tired of hearing about how income equality kills the will to work and produce. No one who works for a living deserves to have to wonder if they’re going to be able to make the rent, pay for food/bills, or whether or not they’ll be able to save the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars it will take to send their children off to gain the skills and knowledge it takes to be a strong, independent contribution to society.

      Finally, I grew up under the impression that if I work hard, I’ll have everything I need. The point was not to amass unnecessary wealth. It was to have my needs and basic comforts met so that I could focus on making sure my contribution to the United States of America forged tears of envy in the eyes of every onlooker in the world. Our starve-the-workers free trade social molestation has made us not only a laughing stock around the world, it’s raised the depression, obesity, suicide, single parent household, and drug/porn addiction rates exponentially. The state of families in America has nothing to do with the common household and whether or not they go to church. It has everything to do with simple values–like limiting stress–not being followed on an economic level. There’s no morality in the center of our world: work. The US is overworked, underpaid, and undervalued by even our fellow citizens.

      • Chin Scratcher

        Well said.  Wealth worship is so bad here even Warren Buffett is asking how much longer before the American people quit it.

      • Guest

        Wow, what a bunch of sanctimonious drivel. “Boo hoo hoo! The world owes me a living! I deserve a huge paycheck, and electricity, and modern medicine, and luxury housing, because I was promised! Wah wah wah!” Let me sum it up for you: People are tired of paying the bills of ungrateful idiots and lazy losers like you. Get in the race and earn your keep or go die in a mudhole with the other scum too lazy to wipe your own cracks. And here’s a protip: The “people are starving” meme only works in countries where the “poor people” aren’t giant gooey slobs with hairy rolls of fat spilling out of their sagging boxer shorts.

      • Anonymous

        It is a fact that the highest single indicator that a child will live in poverty is being born to a single mother. And that is probably what dalelittle meant by “moral decay”

    • ONE of many

      Amen. If we can simplify life we can easily see that moral decay leads to corruption, corruption leads to the death of a society. I am 28 years old and I am baffled by the ignorance and stupidity of my generation that wants everything simply handed to them and not worked for. It is a shame that it seems the majority of my generation accepts and promotes moral decay. It’s time for those who care about the United States of America to rise up and take a stand and take this country back again. This phrase rings true, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” Let’s take our country back.

  • Suhyr786

    Why isnt there a comparason to education inMiddle Eastern or other Asian countries

  • Faulkner

    You should read the “the deliberate dumbing down of america”, pretty much sums it up.

  • Anthony Kurt MacKAY

    What we need is more hours in school and more days in the year. That’s a key difference between most of the nations and correlates with outcomes.

  • Karlwespdx

    I’ve heard enough hating of learning. Has anyone ever tried? Please people, read and tell people what you’ve read.

  • Karlwespdx

    Actually, have anyone ever been overcame by information/sensory overload? This is even without concerning children, where brain structures are no where mature? I love my country. Besides, what’s the national expenditure for education, some 2%?

    • Kkohls

       your are a teacher aren’t you?

    • Lisa1j

      The word is overcome not overcame. Without concerning children? I think a course in basic english in order. Speaking of basic english, I would like to mention the fact that the internet is flooded with open source (free) basic courses and some that are not so basic. If we as a country are interested in saving money on education then this is a great platform to do so. My son has already taken three courses this summer and I am on my fourth. I am also currently designing a grant writing course and a creative writing course that I will be uploading to an open source platform later this summer, probably Moodle or Chamilo. 

      Please pass this information on for those parents who want to give themselves and their children and edge. A basic google search for open source courses will lead you to many of them. 

      I am glad to see that people are having a conversation about the state of our educational system and aside from funding an overburden, outdated system there are many other problems that need to be addresd. So far however, I haven’t heard a single solution. Isn’t that the grand idea of education to create thinkers who can analyze problems and find solutions?

      I do have some ideas, but I won’t bother any of you with them because this seems like a place for people who are more interested in ranting and rehashing problems that we already know about than a place for people who are interested in an open discussion to solve the problems.  

      I’d like to add one more thought that some of you probably won’t want to hear. None of you would be here in America today if your immigrant parents and grandparents were not allowed to come in to the States. Unless you are a Native American you are the product of an immigrant. Why on earth do so many American’s want to keep immigrants out? If it’s because they are taking our jobs, then open your own business and create some more jobs. There are after all plenty of customers. 

      I think for those of you who do feel that way are missing the big picture and it should be very obvious. And that’s overpopulation in general. 

      If you’re not part of the solution you are part of the problem. 

  • GAC

    I am doing a report for school, and this infographic was a huge visual and educational aid.  Thank You so much

  • ace

    Did you know in China even the poor children do extremely well on their tests. We need to emphasize the value of education more, because we are a larger country than most of these countries. 

  • http://fencinginmelbourne.com/ fencing in melbourne

    Whether it’s public or private schools, the US pays more and gets less. 
    This is a cultural problem that goes beyond income inequality or
    whether government can provide services more efficiently than private
    industry.  

  • http://mytungstenrings.com/tungsten-rings/black-tungsten-rings/ Black Tungsten Wedding Bands

    I love my country. Besides, what’s the national expenditure for education, some 2%?

  • Dbruce30

    Education is the new religion. Check out how much we spend on it and don’t even expect results. After all its for the kids right……? 

    • Richard Bunce

      Government education industrial complex must be fed…

  • http://twitter.com/mayorkl mayorkl

    Fact – People are not equal
    Fact – Money does not solve problems
    Fact – fewer students per classroom makes for better students
    Fact – School is not for everyone, but reading, basic math, and social skills are universally required to be successful at any level
    Fact – Family values has to include discussing the divorce rate and teenage pregnancy rates, not just kids out of wedlock and abortions and gay adoption (aka – it’s not a right vs left, red vs blue issue)
    Fact – income inequality and unemployment are linked. Medium and large corporations have purposefully moved jobs off-shore, leaving fewer total jobs for American workers, specifically for those with limited education (see: manufacturing, call centers), thereby creating a permanent underclass of individuals who were the backbone of American dominance in manufacturing and middle class strength for decades after WWII. 

    Adding 100,000 teachers to America’s classrooms (at minimum), including teachers in vocational schools, will allow more personal attention to both high performers and low performers, while not leaving the average performers out to dry. Vocational schools play a HUGE role in building a successful middle class as well as giving low income families the ability to get job training for skilled work as defined by market need. 

    • Anonymous

       It’s always profound when people such as yourself express common sense.  KUDOS!

    • guestola

      Though studies suggest that smaller classrooms start to have an effect right around single digit number of students per teacher. 100,000 ain’t even close to what it would take. Lack of funds isn’t the problem, tax dollars getting sucked into the teacher-> union -> political contributions machine. (sorry, am too lazy to look up study, but here’s something worth watching… http://reason.com/reasontv/2012/09/05/the-machine-the-truth-behind-teachers-un

  • Anonymous

    Mixing low performers in with high ones does not work. Higher passing requirements are needed for improvement. Making it easier to pass defeats the purpose of education. People have to be challenged and rewarded for better results to improve the education quality of all our citizens. Stop providing entitlements for slackers. 

  • Webnuts4u2-spew

    It’s more work, more desire and more drive. It’s not the money.

  • Kim Green

    I love your graph.  The color will appeal to the right-brained feelers of the world and might get the point across that money does not equal great academic results.  I home educate my three boys and the statistics for home education show that traditional factors in education matter little to the student.  Homeschoolers outperform even private school students although parent income and education might be far lower than those of the comparative students. (See stats from NHERI.org.)  Finland’s system is amazing in every aspect.  It looks at children as children and not education as a jobs-driven or government-driven directive.  HOW do children learn best?  Is homework ACTUALLY beneficial for students?  Turns out it’s not, really.  Do children really need to sit in desks for hours upon hours per day and does this aid in learning?  And that leads us to drugging our children (in actuality, our boys) to sit still and learn visually even if that’s not how they’re bent.  Watch the following videos, they are brilliant:  
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY and 
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U.

  • Riley

    The United States still has the highest education system and this test was based on a survey of fifteen year old’s. Many people from other high education countries come to America for it’s good collages (mostly Asian student’s) and so far we still have the best model for education in the world, mostly due to the high amount of students going to college.

  • Monroeg

    Reading these posts is a joke. We are all equale in this goverment each and every one of us owes approx. $500000 of the national debt mabey we all need to realize that this is because WE as americans let money be spent foolishly. Lets keep spending money on $14 million dollar athletes and $25000 on teachers and then wonder why are we so far behind all these other countries. Lets elect career politicians that belive the average income is $250000.Read the Declaration of Independence and decide what Our Duty as Americans is. This goverment is not working for us any longer.We should change what we are doing in order to change the problems. A great man once said:
    “Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.” ― Albert Einstein

  • http://twitter.com/BradNova Brad Nova

    I wish they would have shown the spending on a per student basis instead of total spending for all students. It would have shown that the U.S. is not number one and that the differences are not that much.

  • Jim McGrath

    This is disingenuous.  I heard of this site through Bruce Tinsley’s cartoon Mallard Fillmore–a conservative justification to spend less on education.  It only takes a few minutes to adjust the per capita spending per country by average income–which must be done because personnel is the major cost, and personnel are paid according to a country’s economy.  Lo and behold, adjusting for income differences, the US, UK, and Finland are within inches of each other.

    The fair question then becomes, why does Finland do so much better than the US with essentially the same money?  Clearly adding money doesn’t guarantee performance.  But having volunteered in public schools for over 7 years now, and working with programs like “Reading Recovery”, taking money away from successful programs guarantees a poorer result.

  • Work. Share. Create. Educate.

    The US is the third largest country, and has a population of roughly 300 million people. It’s no wonder that they invest more money into education than all of the countries on that list, who all have a relatively small population. When you account for population, we probably spend less on education than the other countries on this list. After all, over 50% of taxes go to the military. I do agree that we should work hard learn and improve on the systems of countries with successful and accelerating education, and strive to create state and federal based curriculums that place an importance on math and science, but I do not believe we should acheive this goal by investing less in education.

  • roland

    Consider the size of the united states population to these other countries.
    Those countries that are ranked higher than us probably spend more money on each child.

    • Richard Bunce

      First bar chart is annual spending per school aged child.

  • http://www.facebook.com/TriggerHappyCharlie Jeff Ebel

    I don’t know about any of you, but I went to a high school with a principal, 2 vice principals, and a lady with the title Dr. before her name. I never EVER saw the main principal, the vice principals walked around being useless. And Dr. Marshall? What a joke! I am not sure the exact$ amounts they “earned,” but I’m guessing it was at least a combined $ 500,000yr. At the current market rate, you could employ at least ten teachers complete with classroom supplies

    • http://www.facebook.com/TriggerHappyCharlie Jeff Ebel

      And that was just at my school. Multiply that by the number of all high schools in the country, and I’m sure you’ll find why we spend so much in education and get so little. All you assholes want to talk about entitlements?! These “administrators” are the entitled ones. Along with their pay, they also receive health benefits, better than those of the people that actually educate the children.

  • Lan

    Thanks for the statistics. I been trying to follow up on how much US spend on education. Make me wonder how do we spend alot of money but still not get better?

    • Andragogical

      Spending has nothing to do with results. That’s the fallacy that needs to go by the wayside.

    • http://twitter.com/Cajsa Cajsa

      Politicians mandating that students be taught false information such as creationism might have something to do with it. All the time teaching to tests rather than teaching might have something to do with it.

  • Evaniaenlanya

    thanks you hepled me alot!!!

  • Dsoan95

    because our culture is comparable to a laxative. Money does not encourage kids to achieve and work hard and contribute to society is some manner or form later in life. Money does not make classes dynamic enough to influence and bring student enthusiasm or at least a sprinkle of interest for the subject. Money doesn’t change anything in education. Korean students on average only sleep for 4 hours every school day you twat

  • Jeff

    How do the results shown here fit in with the finding that we are doing well except with poor students? See here:

    http://www.schoolfunding.info/news/policy/2011-01PISA.php3

    • http://twitter.com/diegosundevil SD Sun Devil

      This is an excellent link. The US is huge and the most diverse in any category you can think of. It’s hard to just take the average and draw meaningful conclusions.

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_RMFAI7WAJELEOXXXPB34QOQNQM Martin S

    This decline started when the dept of education was implemented. Cost went up and results went down. This is what happen when you try to implement the socialist idea that everyone has to be equal. It is impossible to make everyone equal to the brightess so we take the brightess and dumb them down. Results is all are equally mediocre. It cost a lot of money to do this.

    • Grampas

       The socialist system in Finland seems to work quite well for they greatly outperform the US in all areas. Do note that Finland does not allow private/charter schools to exists, only socialized/public schools exist in Finland. Note also that all teachers in Finland must have a masters degree, that teachers are the fifth highest paid profession, and that there are more teachers per student than in the US. you may also want to look at what the taechers pay to receive their masters degree in education.

      • JanDO

        Yet, private schools here in America have been shown to outperform public schools even though they are in “disadvantaged” with significantly lower teacher salaries, lower degrees of teacher education, and higher teacher turn over rates. Also, private schools here find a way to spend 1/3 to almost 1/2 of the amount that public schools do per student. I wouldn’t blame private schools for our education problems, I would look to them for solutions.

        http://www.publicpurpose.com/pp-edpp.htm

        • John Czarnecki

          Including our private schools, socialist Finland outperforms them all.

          • Evolusi

            It’s not the schools that are outperforming, it’s the parents.

          • http://www.facebook.com/chris.pasquariello.7 Chris Pasquariello

            How diverse is Finland?

        • Lennerd B.

          The first and most important teacher every child has is her/his parent. The kids in private schools generally have benefited from the superior parenting that money helps to provide, that is, opportunities for exploration, travel, music, dance, golf, tennis lessons, etc. A person’s outlook is mostly formed by the time they are five years old. Those so-called “disadvantages” you’re citing that private schools have are more than made up for by the counterweight of parental education, involvement, and the esteem with which such parents view the education of their kids. The schools and their teachers have a far easier lift than a school and a teacher have in a ghetto. I know, I’ve taught in both: Los Angeles public schools where almost all the parents of the kids are 1st generation immigrants and in private schools where the kids were the children of famous Hollywood actors and the children and grandchildren of Nobel Prize-winning scientists. And yes, I got paid less at the private school.

          It’s not the schools that are out-performed, it’s the parents who are out-performed by their much richer peers. Mostly the teachers at both types of schools have the same level of education and expertise because they’ve all been to the same US colleges and universities. When I went from public to private to and back to public school teaching I didn’t suddenly become a better or worse teacher. The tuition at the private school was over $20,000 a year, so they certainly didn’t underspend what the public schools put into each kid!

        • Ophelia

          Families invest heavily in the private school education. This is not counted in per pupil expenditure. Also, they do not accept students who do not fit a certain profile.

        • http://www.facebook.com/emerson.gravely Emerson Gravely

          To say that without considering the difference of pupils in private schools with the difference in pupils in public schools is beyond ludicrous. If we look to private schools for solutions, the solution will be to make 99% of all students rich and white.

          • Kyle

            Your last statement couldn’t be further from the truth. I attended a private school in Oklahoma that is consistently top 10 in the state in test scores, and it was roughly 50% white. I would guess that 5% of the families earned more than $100,000 a year. The vast majority of the students were squarely middle class. The reason my school was successful was because they held us to extremely high standards because they were held to extremely high standards. If their students didn’t learn, parents would stop sending their kids there and the school would close. Because of this, poor teachers who were doing a poor job were fired.

            The problem with our current public school system is that schools get punished for kids not graduating through decreased funding, decreased demand for teachers, etc. I would rather have 70% of kids graduating with an excellent education than 95% graduating with a watered down education.

            I would highly recommend you look into the model set forth by the American Indian Public Charter Schools. They consistently rank at the top of California schools in spite of having a student body that is made up of poor minorities who qualify for free lunches. They’re currently being investigated for mishandling funds which makes their success even more impressive in my opinion because it shows that they were successful with even less funds than we were initially led to believe.

          • ICBM904

            My statement is very close to the truth if you ignore outliers like your private school. You can’t possibly expect the same educational outcomes for affluent kids who start schools with larger vocabularies than the mothers of kids living in poverty. You can’t possibly expect the same educational outcomes for motivated kids whose educated parents are highly involved in their educations with unmotivated kids whose uneducated parents don’t care about their educations. That would be dismissing all research to the contrary and would be contrary to common sense and logic as well. Your diagnosis of what’s “wrong” with public schools is too simplistic, in the face of myriad social problems, to be credible.

          • Jack Klompus

            What a hysterical lie.

          • ICBM904

            What a ridiculous post.

          • Jason

            You’re inferring from JanDO’s suggestion that looking to private schools for the example implies that only the rich and white can succeed in education, which is complete BS. Lennerd B. gets closer to the truth.

          • ICBM904

            No, I implied that touting the success of private schools compared to public schools while ignoring the differences between students in public and private schools is ludicrous. It’s just that simple. If you think the students in a poverty-ridden public school with parents who barely get them to school, never interact with the school, and never involve themselves in their child’s education are going to learn at the same rate as affluent, private-school students who begin with vocabularies greater than the parents of the welfare child, then you’re short on the latest educational research and on logic and common sense.

      • http://profiles.google.com/richardstarr Richard Starr

        Finland does not have quite the same challenges with an influx

        of illiterate/poor immigrant population that adds a significant burden to the system. Add to that the burdens imposed by political correctness that insists on equal results, resulting in a dumbing down of our kids and the problems related to politically powerful teacher’s unions that make removal of poor/incompetent (sometimes criminal) teachers an expensive if not impossible task.

        • http://www.facebook.com/claudia.gold.94 Claudia Gold

          “Sahlberg doesn’t think that questions of size or homogeneity should give Americans reason to dismiss the Finnish example. Finland is a relatively homogeneous country — as of 2010, just 4.6 percent of Finnish residents had been born in another country, compared with 12.7 percent in the United States. But the number of foreign-born residents in Finland doubled during the decade leading up to 2010, and the country didn’t lose its edge in education. Immigrants tended to concentrate in certain areas, causing some schools to become much more mixed than others, yet there has not been much change in the remarkable lack of variation between Finnish schools in the PISA surveys across the same period.”

          http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-americans-keep-ignoring-about-finlands-school-success/250564/

      • http://www.facebook.com/chris.pasquariello.7 Chris Pasquariello

        Socialism works when it is not mixed with diversity.

        • Robert

          Racism works when its not mixed with inteligence

          • http://www.facebook.com/chris.pasquariello.7 Chris Pasquariello

            lolol, that’s racist? It’s true. I said nothing of anyone’s race on this post.

    • John Czarnecki

      Well Martin, mostof the countries ahead of the US on the charts above are far more socialist then we are with better results. Blows your theory all to hell.

    • beseriousplease

      I hope you’re a leftist trying to mock the right, because what you posted isn’t even close to a rational thought.

    • Lennerd B.

      Martin, it is not a socialist ideal that everyone has to be equal. Clearly, people are not at all equal. Some people are born smart, rich, and good-looking, others stupid, poor, and ugly. That’s Nature for ya.

      But the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America states in part that “all men” are created equal. What that means is that in the eyes of the Founders of the country, the law (and some would say God) views each citizen as worthy of being afforded the equal protection of the law, such as the law provides. If you don’t believe in this proposition, then you are at odds with the founding principles of this country.

      I invite you to look at my post about poverty and to read the link below, posted by Jeff which goes into some detail about the effects of poverty on pre-school and school-aged children.

      All the so-called socialists are trying to say is that to give a child born into poverty an equal shot means that we have to give them a hand up where a rich kid already has the hand up and the handout — from his family.

    • wisdompersonified

      Martin, your point is right on. Much of the commentary here disagrees with you because they cannot handle the truth, and it definitely doesn’t coincide with their socialist agendas. True equality is to develop the potential of each child to the greatest level, not to feed everyone the same slop in the name of “equality”, even if it is “good” slop.

  • Neversumm3r

    Is the per-student spending extrapolated from the total UN-defined estimates of school-aged children?  Are each of the countries’ data points addressed to actual school-aged population?  In addition, does your backing data have budgetary allocations identified for the total spending numbers cited?  I wonder where these “spendthrift” countries are putting their money to get those results. 

    Also, are there data to speak to social status of the populations identified?  Individual student SES indicators would certainly impact testing “success” and learning “rates”.

    http://www.upworthy.com/which-countries-pays-their-teachers-what-theyre-worth

    Japan is kicking US butt, however they are spending more per teacher than the US for their time.  What does that infographic and this one above tell us?  …

  • Mbrandsma4

    As someone who was raised in Europe (the Netherlands) thru age 21, then finished college in the US, I have unique personal experience of both education systems. From my personal perspective doesn’t have anything to do with “socialist” or “conservative” approach, but has everything to do with expectations: both of the teachers, as well as the students. Expect a lot, you’ll get a lot; expect little and that’s what you get. 

    Schools in the Netherlands teach to a high standard, that’s it. They don’t do sports, they don’t have social engineering, or social clubs (at least not when I was in school), no “home coming”, prom, and all other things that are distractions from education.I also agree with Martin S that teacher salaries are a good indicator of how much value a country really puts on education, regardless what the politicians say during the campaign. In Holland, a teacher’s pay is higher than in the US and is enough to support a family as a one-income family, if you so choose. Here in the US, large majority of primary and secondary teachers are part of a two-income family. Clearly the higher $$ per pupil is not going where it needs to: teachers and curriculum.

    Let’s pay teachers more, expect more from them. Let’s cut out the social engineering in our US schools, and get back to basics of math, science, comprehensive reading. The US can, should, and will rise again, but only if it gets serious about core education, and cutting down all the distractions.

    • Ophelia

      However, there are social safety nets in the Netherlands that do not exist here. We have no paid sick leave for many employees nor maternity/paternity leave nor child care. The most caring with high expectations will raise insecure children when there is financial difficulty. In the US, the cycle of poverty is tough to break.

    • Austin

      I’d like to know what you mean by “social engineering” in schools in the USA.

  • NordicChicMN

    How much of the”money spent per pupil” in the U.S. is spent on adminstrators, school buildings, & fancy technology vs in other countries?  As opposed to how much is spent on paying really well educated teachers to teach???

    • http://twitter.com/Cajsa Cajsa

      How much is spent on expensive standardized testing programs sold by the people who lobbied for No Child Left Behind? They have made billions and diverted teacher energy from teaching how to think and learn to teaching to the tests.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/John-Collins/807503167 John Collins
    • Km

      John, that link shows spending as a percentage of GDP. The US has the highest GDP in the world.

  • just wondering

    does anyone know if this information is normalized by GDP…or average cost of living?

  • Lennerd B.

    Full disclosure: I’m a teacher. My college professor told me on almost the first day of class: the public schools you will go to teach in will perfectly reflect the value and esteem the community has towards education.

    Couldn’t be truer.

    This has echoes of the health care debate: the US spends the most per capita there and on k-12 education with neither highest longevity in the case of healthcare, nor highest test scores in the case of education as the result of all that money.

    But the real unexamined parts of this is poverty. If you remove the bottom 20% poor kids from our calculations, the remainder perform right up there with Finland and Singapore, the perennial leaders in the test score sweepstakes. And if we could, as the Scandanavians including the Finns have largely done, remove the effects of poverty on school-age children, we could bring up our whole ship. Poverty almost guarantees that parents to have no time for reading to their kids, buy books, go to libraries. Show me a kid who thinks learning is fun because she’s been in a great preschool for two years before entering kindergarten and I’ll show you a kid who will be a successful learner. Show me a kid who is lost on the first day of school because they don’t know 1 from 2, red from green, and a from z and can easily see that other kids do know these things, and I’ll show you a kid who will struggle for likely years, feel herself to be “less than.” All from poverty and the resultant stresses of no money and parenting without opportunity.

    The first 5 years are the most important formative years in a kid’s life. And we have almost no education plan for that age group. So the school systems, using a manufacturing metaphor, put into their assembly lines components that they know to be inferior and expect a stellar product out the end in 12 years. This is folly. The parents are always the first and most important teacher a child has.

  • enow

    Sorry, but the simple fact is that a society that gears their educational system to satisfy political agendas, religion, economic gain and sports is not going to produce anything more than poorly skilled individuals. It is time for the American citizen to wake up and realize that we are NOT #1 at anything, except at spending. Education is critical to a viable democracy, and we pay little or no attention to learning, we are too individualistic, to self absolved and out of touch.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Porterfield-Exotics/1592359792 Porterfield Exotics

    Restore education to the states and let the states compete for perfomance.

  • 16th amendment

    No one has mentioned the main reason for the sorry state of US education: Teacher unions. Of course, central planning through state governments and the federal department of education is to blame too.

    Does the spending per student include the massive pensions, health care benefits? In many countries kids stay in school longer, meaning that teachers are paid less to work more. One should at spending per capita per school day.

    Our socialistic ideas in the US are putting us on a path towards decline.

    • Ophelia

      I pay for my pension. I also pay for my benefits. Additionally, why do other countries pay the healthcare and benefits of all citizens but we do not? Unions may have problems but are not the cause. Any place that has no union has much more unstable communities in the US than unionized labor jobs create.

      • 16th amendment

        The question is are you contributing enough for the amount you are getting back?

        Suppose you make 72k a year, or 6k a month, and put 1k or 16% into your pension/401k. Using the calculator at http://www.webwinder.com/wwhtmbin/java_fv2.html, plug in that your initial investment is 0, monthly contribution 1k, interest 3.5%, and 30 years. Final value is $637,266. At retirement they recommend taking 4% of your account balance every year, so that works out to $25,490 per year.

        Most teacher contributions are less than 16%. Some are even 0%. Pensions are often based on the final year salary, like in CA. Historical rates of return are between 3% and 4%. Yet public unions get much more than 25k pensions.

        In CA they passed a law saying that teachers can get up to 90% of their final year salary, and police 100%. They did this at the height of the dot-com boom and assumed we would an annual rate of return of 8%. That’s highly optimistic and goes very against historical norms. The final year salary could easily be above 100k.

        Pensions are also unfunded, unless you are a union boss. This means that your pensions go into a big fund, and part of the fund is sold off the pay current pensioners. Like a Ponzi scheme.

        In IL teachers went on strike and turned down a 16% raise over 4 years (and this in a time when people are not getting such big raises because of the economy) because they don’t want teacher evaluations. It is practically impossible to fire a bad teacher.

      • 16th amendment

        Also, I’d say that places with strong unions are often more unstable. Huge salary and pension costs can bring a company down. We saw that with Hostess. You observe that airlines with big unions are in trouble too, from United, Delta, American Airlines. Even some cities like Vallejo and Stockton have gone broke. With government salaries and pensions they just raise taxes — property taxes, sales taxes, income taxes, traffic fines, you name it — to pay the benefits, sometimes cutting other jobs (such as state parks, recycling). And people see their taxes going up, and over time that makes society as a whole less stable.

    • http://twitter.com/bluestblueroses blueblueroses

      And yet, Finland, which has very strong teacher’s unions, is leading the world in education and student outcomes. Teaching is also the fifth-highest paid profession there, attracting the best of the best to that field.

      I’d like to see a comparison about what the US spends vs the other First World nations that are excelling in education, but I truly doubt that the cost of unions and good teacher benefits is causing the drag.

      • 16th amendment

        See my response to Ophelia, where I say that pensions costs are enormous. In CA, the government estimates that pension costs will be $500 over 10 years. The state (just state, not counties and cities) spends about $200B a year. So $50B a year is enormous. Police and firefighter pensions account for most of the pension cost though.

  • Dannie

    The state of education in the U.S. is a reflection of our society as a whole. Give me this and give me that. Teacher MAKE me smarter. When will we as Americans get back to our roots and earn all that we desire instead of look for an easy way out. Washington DC is not the answer, more money is not the answer, the answer is to find the drive to become excellent. Something certain individuals in this country lothe. I won’t name names or call anybody names, you figure it out. Or will that be too difficult – maybe I should give you the answer.

  • http://www.facebook.com/james.dorans James Dorans

    In Finland Education is put as a high priority for Parents. In the US the majority think schools are for babysitting.

    Private schools the parents actually care about Education

  • http://www.facebook.com/james.dorans James Dorans

    We also have more kids with different cultures, needs and it is really cold in Finland so what else does the kids have to do.

    Kids also start later in Finland then the US.

  • Mina Rakastan Sinua

    Why talk out your A rings when you can, oh I don’t know, read something. Oh right, because you’re Americans. You don’t have to read anything to know everything.
    http://www.ncee.org/programs-affiliates/center-on-international-education-benchmarking/top-performing-countries/finland-overview/finland-teacher-and-principal-quality/

  • wisdompersonified

    What you are not seeing is that these socialist (and communist) countries cull out much of their student population at an early age if they determine (by their own standards, of course) that these children are not suitable for academia, higher education, etc., and quietly redirect (sentence) them to a life of oblivion in the lower echelons of their society. So the scores you see do not reflect the general student population in these nations, but only the “elite” students. Equal education for all? Not by a long shot. Not even close. Thank God for the freedom we have in America to pursue higher education throughout our lifetimes. That being said, there is much corruption, misspending, social agendas, inequalities, biases, etc. that need addressing in our own public education system.

    • Rod1977

      The thing is that the “elite” students you are talking about, are elite based upon score, IQ and performance. They don’t have daddy’s big wallet behind them. Sure they are not perfect, and our system is not perfect either, but there is a lot we can learn from each other. Equal education is also a risky assumption. Not everyone has the brains nor the talent. I have seen a lot of my college peers graduate and become frustrated because they felt ill prepared or lacked the talent. Now they are doing something totally unrelated to what they studied for, and yes, they still have to pay the big student loans that come with the “freedom” of education. Also the statement “oblivion in the lower echelons of society” is not appropriate. I personally know technicians in Germany and France, that make more money than many “college” graduates. BUT One thing America has, above all other countries, is that if you have the brains and the talent, you are quickly recognized and your chances of success are much higher and for that I am grateful.

  • USdoesntrock

    Even though the US population has been dumb down considerably, all our students feel good about themselves. No one is left behind. All students are rewarded for just showing up. We don’t want any of our kids to feel about themselves because some one else scored higher on a test. We are the US and the best country in the world damn it. We may not score the highest education but we got everyone else beat in military spending and incarceration of our citizens. :P

  • Dumdeedoe

    Korea,Germany,Japan,and China maybe socialist countries but their education system is performance based and far more “capitalistic” than the US public schools are… We have “no child left behind.” They have “if you can’t cut it you dig a ditch for a living.” They outperform our schools across the board…
    The only socialist school based on equality and not performance is the Finnish model that out performs all others… So I guess no system is superior, thay are all better than ours..

  • http://www.facebook.com/desiree.mcquay Desiree McQuay

    Here is a quote from the Union’s top lawyer The National Education Association’s (NEA) top lawyer, Bob Chanin, recently made clear the goal of the NEA. He called those who believe in and work for traditional family values “b****rds.” He also praised the NEA because the organization has “power” and “hundreds of millions” of dollars from dues to spend in promoting their agenda and political candidates.

    audio of
    Chanin saying in the same speech, “Which is why, at least in my opinion, NEA
    and its affiliates are such effective advocates. Despite what some among us
    would like to believe, it is not because of our creative ideas. It is not
    because of the merit of our positions. It is not because we care about
    children. And it is not because we have a vision of a great public school for
    every child. NEA and its affiliates are effective advocates because we have
    power.”
    Did that answer anyone’s questoin as to why the education system is broken. Many teachers care more about tenure, power, using our children as bargaining chips, than teaching. Unions have got to go!!

  • pookie

    I’m sorry, but these figures are terribly wrong. The U.S. did not spend 809.6 billion in 2011, it spent 71.6.

  • Mike

    yeah, go ahead and check out the suicide rates in these socialist countries then see how much your education is worth to you.

  • http://www.groovychristian.com/ Christopher Shaw

    Top 5 countries (math scores) and their corresponding
    populations:
    1. Finland: 5 million
    2. South Korea: 50 million
    3. Canada: 34 million
    4. Japan: 128 million
    5. Australia: 22 million

    The United States has about 314 million people. You can have a nationalized education system when you’re dealing with such relatively small populations. When you’re at 300+ million, managing and paying for education at the national level doesn’t make sense. Let states solve (and pay for) their own unique education problems instead of using the federal government as a corrupt, money-siphoning middle-man.

  • http://www.carpetmelbournedirect.com.au/ Carpets Melbourne

    Education really worth a lot whatever it takes.