Give education spending a purpose

Funding is not an educational philosophy. You can spend an extraordinary amount on a school and still fail to explain how the kid inside it is supposed to learn. In September 2026 I shared Daniel Di Martino's criticism of the New York school attended by Nikole Hannah-Jones's daughter. The post contrasted a claimed $52,000 per pupil at that school with a claimed $149 per month for homeschooling in Mississippi. The question behind the provocation matters: what did the expensive arrangement actually deliver to the child? Its price tag should not answer that question for us.

Those figures are the comparison I shared, not a verified ranking of educational efficiency. Matching years, services and learning measures are not established; the children and support around them may differ; a school budget purchases more than a curriculum subscription. A family's time is also a real cost even when it never appears on an invoice. Those limits prevent a triumphant division of the two numbers. They do not explain why the expensive arrangement deserves to continue without showing what its spending made possible.

The money ought to solve a problem you can name. A child needs a book they can read, a tool for the thing they want to build, or someone who can finally explain the mathematics that keeps defeating them. Spend to make those things possible. What I reject is the assumption that the institutional price tag itself deserves our confidence, as if adding another layer of administration were equivalent to adding another hour of useful instruction. The child receives the education, not the budget.

The order of the decisions matters. Begin with an account of what the learner needs, then ask which resources would provide it, rather than begin with an institution's existing expenses and look for reasons to preserve them. A useful service might justify substantial spending. A familiar expense might turn out to contribute little. Without that account, another funding increase can make the arrangement more expensive while leaving its central educational failure untouched.

This is why I keep returning to educational philosophy. Good texts give a student something worth knowing; explanation reaches the particular person; useful work makes them apply what they thought they understood. A resource has value insofar as it strengthens those relationships. Before asking how to fund more of an arrangement, we should be able to explain why the arrangement deserves to survive.

That question is uncomfortable for a system accustomed to treating its size as evidence of seriousness. A parent can be serious with one book and a conversation, while an institution can be unserious with an entire department. Scale tells us how much machinery exists. It tells us neither whether the child is thinking nor whether their thinking is becoming better. We should stop letting one stand in for the other.

Cost matters because educational freedom needs a practical alternative. A parent may know that the current arrangement does not serve the child and still lack the money or time to assemble something else. I want personal instruction made less difficult to obtain, with providers doing more of the work a family cannot reasonably supply alone. The purpose of reducing the burden is to make choice consequential, so that knowing your child needs another education can lead to providing one.

A budget is a set of decisions, and every decision ought to have an educational account: this buys access to knowledge, this buys responsive attention, this makes a serious undertaking possible. The account may justify a large expense or a small one. It may also reveal something we should stop purchasing. What it cannot do is begin and end with the price, as though the child's understanding were an automatic consequence of how much we charged somebody else.