At 651 pages, the U.S. Department of Education’s recently released Digest of Education Statistics isn’t so much a digest as an encyclopedia of every relevant number concerning schooling in this country. It takes years to compile the figures, so they are not up to the minute, but the researchers also add their projections for the next 10 years. We get a clear picture of what has happened, and what is likely to happen in the near future.
The document has almost everything you need to know about education, both public and private, but here we will limit ourselves to two topics: expenditures and staffing.
Because we so often hear about how America shortchanges education, it’s worth knowing that we spent an estimated $1.5 trillion in 2018-19 on education at all levels. That’s about 7 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product. Spending on K-12 schools totaled an estimated $832 billion, of which 92 percent went to public schools.