Speaking of Richard Vedder, he used to say that the only profession that has had less productivity improvement over the past half-century than education is prostitution. And new evidence suggests that he may be wrong about that.

Exhibit A is the Los Angeles Unified School District, which is the nation’s second largest, with more than 1,000 schools and a budget of nearly $20 billion.

A third of its students drop out without graduating from high school.  Over 72% of students fail math tests, and over 58% fail English.

Over the last dozen years, the schools have seen the number of staffers and their budgets soar while the number of students has plummeted.

The national picture isn’t much better. Student enrollment dropped during the school lockdowns and has flatlined since – while hiring has surged by over 600,000 K-12 employees over a decade. Can anybody explain what all these added people are accomplishing?

You can see the numbers for every state and many individual districts at the Georgetown Edunomics website here. This is negative productivity. Public Schools are jobs programs not educational institutions.