When it comes to K-12 education, vouchers are often talked about as expenditures--and opponents of vouchers often want to know how we are supposed to pay for voucher programs. It seems logical on first blush. But in fact it's inside-out.

Here's John Stossel on just how inside-out it is.

... I said that Washington DC gives voucher schools $7,500 per student, but DC's public schools cost twice that much: $15,000.

The $15,000 number has been cited by congressmen and newspapers like the WSJ and the Denver Post. It comes from the the National Center for Education Statistics, and the Census.

Unfortunately, it's also wrong. Or at least very misleading, since it ignores major sources of spending. As CATO Education scholar Andrew Coulson explains:

DC also has a 'state' level bureaucracy that spends nearly $200 million annually on k-12 programs, and the city spends another $275 million or so on school construction, school facilities modernization, and other so-called 'capital' projects.

But those aren't included in the regular spending figures.

The $15,000 statistic is also misleading because it includes money for kids in charter schools, even though those schools are not guaranteed a student base and so are forced to be much more efficient than regular public schools.

The real figure? $26,000 for each student signed up at a DC public school. $28,000 for each student who actually attended. Some might say that's an unfair number because it includes special education students that the private schools supposedly won't take. But even if you drop the costs of special education students, DC still spends $23,000 per kid.

You know public education is a mess when hardly anyone can keep track of what schools really spend. As Coulson tells me:

School district budgets are so convoluted it's almost as if they're made to be confusing ... DC has split up its education spending into seven different budgets, all of which go to k-12 public education, but only one of which is called 'the DC Public School budget.'

Oh, and the $7,500 for voucher schools? Turns out that the average voucher school only charges $6,620 (many are catholic schools.) So they cost a quarter of what public schools do, but still they do better!

Food for thought: top private day schools in the DC area don't charge all that much more than DC is spending on the nation's worst-performing public schools. Georgetown Day charges between $28K and $32K, depending on your grade level. Sidwell Friends charges about $30K. These are expensive private day schools, it should be noted; tuition there approaches what boarding schools elsewhere cost. I haven't looked at the numbers in a couple of years, but when I was actively looking for independent school jobs, good private day schools across the country were running about $20K a year, while boarding schools were running about $30-35K per year.

Also worth considering: kids in the DC voucher program may be able to cover their entire tuition at a private Catholic school with their voucher. But a number have also put their vouchers toward tuition at places like Georgetown Day, which makes up the difference in scholarship. Having choice makes so much possible.

Here's what DC is producing with its more-than-$20K per student:

--Tests show that in reading and math, the District's public school students score at the bottom among 11 major city school systems, even when poor children are compared only with other poor children. Thirty-three percent of poor fourth-graders across the nation lacked basic skills in math, but in the District, the figure was 62 percent. It was 74 percent for D.C. eighth-graders, compared with 49 percent nationally.

--The District spends $12,979 [or more--see above] per pupil each year, ranking it third-highest among the 100 largest districts in the nation. But most of that money does not get to the classroom. D.C. schools rank first in the share of the budget spent on administration, last in spending on teachers and instruction.

--Principals reporting dangerous conditions or urgently needed repairs in their buildings wait, on average, 379 days -- a year and two weeks -- for the problems to be fixed. Of 146 school buildings, 113 have a repair request pending for a leaking roof, a Washington Post analysis of school records shows.

--The schools spent $25 million on a computer system to manage personnel that had to be discarded because there was no accurate list of employees to use as a starting point. The school system relies on paper records stacked in 200 cardboard boxes to keep track of its employees, and in some cases is five years behind in processing staff paperwork. It also lacks an accurate list of its 55,000-plus students, although it pays $900,000 to a consultant each year to keep count.

--Many students and teachers spend their days in an environment hostile to learning. Just over half of teenage students attend schools that meet the District's definition of "persistently dangerous" because of the number of violent crimes, according to an analysis of school reports. Across the city, nine violent incidents are reported on a typical day, including fights and attacks with weapons. Fire officials receive about one complaint a week of locked fire doors, and health inspections show that more than a third of schools have been infested by mice.