MICHAEL MCSHANE: Some things you should know about education spending. “We don’t know how much a K-12 education costs. We know how much we spend on education, sure, but we don’t know how much it actually costs. This happens because schools (traditional public or charter) spend all of the money we give them. There is no incentive for them to get $7,500 per student per year and only spend $5,000 of it. Similarly there is no incentive for parents to try and find a school that teaches their child for less than what the public will pay for it; they’d just be leaving money on the table. As a result, school budgets expand to spend every penny, and what is essential to providing a quality education and what is not becomes a lot less clear.”