You eventually get there: the US blows a ton of cash on private education, but our public education expenditures -- which this thread has been about up to now -- are unexceptional compared to peer nations. Smack-dab in the middle of the usually pack, really. (And we're also a far less dense country than many of the countries we technically out-spend, which is notable because rural schooling is horrendously expensive on a per student basis.)

If you rolled back to 60s level spending, even inflation adjusted, we'd be down the bottom of that distribution.

Either way, claiming that education is underfunded is unfounded unless most of the other OECD countries are similarly underfunding education.

Why would we even count private education in this discussion? There are no policy controls on private school spend - of course, it's skyrocketing as the rich get richer.

This is moot; as I said, spending on public schools alone in the US is greater than many other OECD countries.

It's on-par with OECD countries, per-child.

It's greater than the UK, France, Korea, and Japan. Either way, hardly underfunded.