Public School: What a Bargain!

My daughter belongs to a local gym. It costs about $15 for an hour long session of gymnastics. Shoving the living room couch aside, I had tried to teach her myself with a YouTube video, but it turns out there’s more involved in safely teaching a back handspring than can be gleaned from watching a video. Educating our children is expensive, but I knew if I wanted to keep both my daughter and my house in one piece, I needed to let the professionals handle it.

According to USA TODAY, the average, per-pupil, public school expenditure in 2010 was  $10,259. Where I live, in Michigan, with all the after-the-fact cuts and last minute give-backs of recent years, we're spending somewhere near $7500 a kid for about 1260 classroom hours, which amounts to around $6 an hour, less than half the hourly cost of my daughter’s gymnastics classes. Membership in the public school system is such a deal!

My children, like their teachers, spend many hours at school above and beyond the seven hours of a typical school day, participating in an astonishing variety of activities—from sports, to fine arts, to academic tutoring—provided by their hard-working, devoted teachers. When you consider this value-added experience, our membership fee to belong to American public education is closer to five bucks an hour. 

I just cut a check for piano lessons for my three kids. The going rate for these private education lessons? $24 an hour. My youngest, too old for group swim classes, needed some private lessons: $30 an hour. I am fortunate that our family is able to provide these experiences for our children, and, I am glad that families unable to afford private music, art, athletic experiences, or academic tutoring are able to send their children to public schools where we still offer these opportunities to everyone who walks in the door. What a deal! Not only do we at public schools provide academic instruction and enrichment, but we often feed and clothe and counsel. And as if that were not impressive enough, our schools provide special needs assistance in many forms, such as speech therapy, adaptive technology, and ESL instruction. 

I am very proud to be a part of the public education club. At $6 an hour, most Americans can afford the membership fee, and the rest of us can chip in fairly painlessly to provide for those who can’t. 

Like many families, when our children were small, we scraped together the money to send them to preschool for three mornings a week. (Then, as now, there was no public preschool available.) It was difficult financially, but we managed it, because we knew that early educational experiences were important to future success in school. I remember how thrilled I was when our youngest started public school, and we no longer had to struggle to find that extra grand or so a year to pay for preschool. Today, that preschool costs $1485 for the year, or about the same $6 an hour of our K-12 public schools. Why is it that many gladly pay to join preschool yet balk at the cost of our K-12 system?

Education is expensive. Just as gymnastics students need trained professionals and safe facilities, our school-age children need books and computers, counseling and tutoring, and top-notch, highly educated teachers. All this for six bucks an hour? What a deal! If it was offered on Groupon, we’d snap it up. I am proud to belong to the public school system both as a parent and as a public school educator for over twenty years. How about you?