Look also at how much it costs to build a school. I taught in a village in AK where they built a $35M school for less than 100 students.
Also, rather than kick out the criminals and the disruptive students, they hire “resource officers”.
But the above poster got it right, special-ed programs and district office type people are the lions share of the budget waste.
As far as the difficulty of teaching multi-level, with the mainstreaming of special-ed and social promotion of screw-ups, we have that anyway. Try teaching Physical science to 10th graders when whe skills vary from 1.75 grade level readers to 11.0
With the one room schoolhouse and direct parent payments, the rotten kids and their parents would be pressured by the other parents to shape up or ship out. That alone would raise the bar.
