Ed Policy - Ed Spending

For those of you who just can't get enough of this topic, you might enjoy this recent video from Stanford University. At the 50:25 min mark, Prof. Linda Darling Hammond says, "One other interesting fact when we compare spending in the US and in other countries is that in virtually all the countries we would be compared to in the OECD rankings, they have nationalized or other buckets in the society from which they pay healthcare. So about 20% of the US education budget actually goes to healthcare for employees [...] and in other countries that's paid outside the education budget"
 What's your response to her point?  Is it misleading to state that the US is one of the top spenders on education? Why/Why not?
 https://medium.com/state-of-the-union-2014/state-of-the-union-2014-class-3-education-a9387c9884fe

Thanks for the link to the Stanford video - very interesting!

In general, the US spends a lot on education.  This interesting infographic shows that we spend much more in total, and more per student - http://rossieronline.usc.edu/u-s-education-versus-the-world-infographic/

Linda Darling Hammond brings up a good point that the way we allocate our spending on education may not be comparable to other countries' education spending.  She brings up that we pay for health care through education, as well as pensions for teachers and other ed professionals.  Also food services for students ($14.8 billion according to this article - http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/27/putting-a-number-on-federal-education-spending/)  And we spend a lot on special education services for a small set of students.  Our education budget number may also be including early education, which I'm not sure if other countries include in their ed budgets, or in their social services budgets. And what about school sports?  Are those finances included in our US education budget?  (http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/10/21/taking-sports-out-of-school-2)  In most other countries, sports are done on a club basis, not primarily through schools.  Given all of these non-educational aspects that may be included in our education budget, I think that it may be misleading to say that the US spends more per child than other countries.

One other big issue as talked about is not how much we spend in general, but how much we spend in different districts.  Many other countries equalize funding, or even send more funding to high need schools (I believe Finland does this).  Where as in the US, there is wide variation in spending on education in different parts of the country - http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/05/23/the-dramatic-inequality-of-public-school-spending-in-america/  Some of this is of course due to differences in cost of living, but still the differences are wide.