The Eight Trillion-Dollar Question

We spent nearly eight trillion dollars on public education over the last decade. What did we build?

The Eight Trillion-Dollar Question

How many students do you serve? Every year, I spend months sitting across from students. Literally. Reading applications with my team from thousands of students in Chicago. Austin. Englewood. Roseland. Little Village. South Shore. Students who are the first in their family to even consider college. Students who are working after-school jobs. Raising siblings. Fighting off trauma. Poverty. Violence. Shouldering adult responsibilities most adults can’t imagine at their age. After years of reading applications, I’ve come to the same realization every single time. It doesn’t even matter. The talent isn’t the issue. It’s everything that comes after the talent. Which is why I can’t get one number out of my head.

Eight trillion dollars.

That’s how much America has spent on public K-12 education over the last decade. Total expenditures have ballooned from just over $670 billion in 2015 to nearly $1 trillion this year. Per pupil spending has increased from about $12,000 to over $17,000. When COVID hit, Congress decided to pour another $190 billion on top of that for emergency relief. (This was the single biggest investment in public education our country has ever made.) Let’s do some math.

What did we get for eight trillion dollars?

The Results

Allow me to break down the return on our investment. Some of these statistics are going to make you angry. And they should. Eighth-grade reading scores are the lowest they’ve been in over 30 years. Only about a third of seniors read at proficient level. Only 1 in 5 students graduate high school meeting proficiency in math. The average kid is reading half a grade level below where students were reading just ten years ago. And I know what you’re about to say. “Well COVID caused all of this.” Hear me out. COVID didn’t start these trends. Schools were seeing declines in student achievement years before the pandemic hit while spending only increased. For the last decade we’ve watched student achievement and school spending move in two direct directions. As we gave more schools saw less return. More investment. Less outcomes. That shouldn’t anger you. It should make you wonder why. Why?

What $190 Billion Taught Us

That’s exactly what COVID gave us. A national experiment. When schools received nearly $190 billion to remediate learning they had everything they needed to improve student outcomes. Buy books. Hire tutors. Lower class sizes. Provide free meals. Give teachers bonuses. They did it all. And guess what happened? Learning improved. Those with adequate resources stopped falling behind. Students in low-poverty schools were able to catch up to their pre-pandemic test scores. But at the rate schools were able to improve it would’ve taken anywhere from five to ten times that amount of money just to reach where they were before COVID. Repeat that if you have to. $950 billion to $1.9 trillion. The largest investment in public education our country has ever made wasn’t enough money to offset the loss caused by COVID. Not because teachers weren’t heroic. Not because kids didn’t want to learn. Schools simply couldn’t escape the pull of the greatest equalizer: poverty. And for the first time, we had numbers to prove it. Across the country, achievement gaps between high-income and low-income students widened throughout the pandemic. Schools with higher rates of poverty lost more ground than their wealthier counterparts. If we thought poverty cured equity before COVID, we know it now. It’s why the students who needed the most support fell even further behind. As soon as we think we’ve figured out how to improve academics we’re reminded just how little we know about poverty.

The Average American School Desk

COVID may have exposed achievement gaps. But there’s another number you’re not seeing. Before the pandemic started roughly 15 percent of students were chronically absent from school. Today we’re closer to one in four students nationally who are missing significant amounts of school. Right here in Chicago, students are missing over 40 percent more days than they were before COVID. According to A Better Chicago’s newest State of Our Youth Report more than four out of every ten CPS students missed over ten percent of last school year. FOUR OUT OF TEN. When we asked students why they missed school, their answers crushed me. Anxiety. Depression. Bullying. Stress. Feeling like they didn’t belong. I never heard “because I was lazy.” Tears. Imagine if we could get every student into school, but they were receiving a subpar education. Would anyone accept that for their kids? We know attendance isn’t that simple. Which is why I love what A Better Chicago is doing with Every Day Counts. Investing in community-based solutions to help students feel safe and engaged at school. A place where they belong. If we want students to show up, we have to give them a reason other than homework. Too often we’ve tried to budget our way out of attendance problems. You can’t force students to attend school. Just like you can’t spend your way into belonging. If students don’t see school as a place that will help them reach their goals, they’ll eventually disconnect and stop coming altogether. And before you say it, they don’t stay absent because they don’t care. They stay absent because they don’t believe it matters to care.

So What’s The Answer?

This is going to sound contradictive, but I’m not saying we should cut funding to schools. In fact, do the exact opposite of what I’m about to say. I care about this work too much to not finish this thought. I’ve spent my career trying to open doors for students who were told they didn’t deserve to walk through them. I’ve read hundreds of essays from kids who had the odds stacked against them. I’ve seen scholarships change family lineages. I’ve watched mentors completely shift how a kid viewed themselves. Internships turn into full-time careers. Resources do matter. They absolutely have an impact on student success. But here’s what else I know. If all we do is continue investing money into a broken system, we’ll just end up with a fancier version of broken. Just because something is great for the economy, doesn’t mean it’s great for every student. Too much of what we’re “rewarding” in schools teaches students to be convenient workers. Not lifelong learners. Too much of school was built for the industry we used to live in. Not the one we’re working towards. We can and should invest in students. I hope we continue to make investments that empower students to be the master of their own education. But if we’re going to keep spending billions of dollars on education like we have been, we better actually spend that money creating a system students want to show up for. A system that prepares them for what’s next. Not what’s gone.

As someone who has spent their career working with students underestimated by traditional systems, Here’s what I want to see…

So nearly every time someone believed enough in kids... They over-performed our expectations. That’s why I will never believe kids are the problem. But I do think.... It’s time we started measuring what matters. Tie each massive investment to student outcomes. Declare a state of emergency on chronic absenteeism. Ensure every student graduates w/Something more than a piece of paper. Trade skills. Career awareness. Networks into local businesses. Money lessons. AI knowledge. Workplace experience. The confidence to tackle problems that no one has ever taught them about. And maybe most important… Students should never have to ask why they’re learning. Purpose isn’t a bonus. When kids know what education can do for them... They sit in class differently. They show up differently. They believe differently.

The Next Trillion Dollars

So here’s one thing I know. America is going to spend another eight trillion dollars educating children.... Whether we change things about our system or not. That’s the bottom line. What’s up for debate is how we spend it. Do we keep investing in the same outcomes? Or do we have enough courage to start designing an education system around where we’re going... Instead of where we’ve been? Because our kids have done their part. They’ve shown up. They’ve believed. They’ve trusted us when we told them school was going to change their lives. Now it’s time we earn that trust. By spending more on them the right way and most of all... By building something they can be proud of.