The day before yesterday I wrote a post about “dropout factory” schools in urban areas, and noted in the post that funding isn’t exactly the problem in a lot of those schools.  Today I got an email from Andrew Coulson, Director of The Cato Institute Center for Educational Freedom, highlighting a Washington Post column he’s written which details the massive amounts of funding failing urban schools in Washington DC get:

Saw your blog post on the dropout crisis the other day, and thought you’d be interested to hear how expensive failing urban public schools have become. I’ve got a piece in the Washington Post today in which I add up all sources of DC k-12 funding and divide the total by enrollment to determine real per pupil spending. It comes out to $25k per pupil annually, in the same ballpark as tuition at the elite Sidwell Friends school attended by Chelsea Clinton during the 1990s. Given how disastrously DC public schools perform, and the fact that many of them are falling apart, I recommend just giving parents a choice of independent schools (whose total per pupil spending I estimate to be about $10k less than in the District’s public schools). I knew the number was going to be high, but it shocked even me. I imagine it’ll stun your readers, too.

$25,000 per student means $500,000, a half-million dollars, for one classroom of twenty students.

That amount apparently isn’t enough for the unionized teachers in Washington DC’s school system to provide a decent education, and that is very shocking.

Read Coulson’s entire column, and the next time someone tells you that funding is the problem with failing schools remember Washington DC and its half-a-million-dollar classrooms.