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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

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Relax. It's only $3000 month per kid. It's $6000 per month for two kids.

Isn't that still a decent salary for a governess?

Yes, I didn't like public school to begin with but learning how ludicrously expensive it actually is is what radicalized me on homeschooling.

While public schools are mostly run by functionaries who are their jobs as being about spending as much money as possible as inefficiently as possible and think the rest of society exists solely to serve that goal, education is also just expensive. Eyeballing Catholic schools near me, tuition for one kid is about $6500/yr at schools attached to working class parishes(upper middle class ones list tuition as ‘it depends’, which probably means it’s subsidized for all but the very wealthy)- with subsidized tuition for subsequent children(presumably this subsidy is paid by the Catholic Church, either at the parish level or by the diocese). My local school district spends just under $10k/yr per kid, not counting capital improvements(Catholic schools don’t either, so this is a fair comparison). So by that comparison about 35% of public school spending is overspending. Charters in my state get about $10,000/yr, with an additional $1,000/student in years with construction going on at the school, so more like public schools.