For the 2018-2019 school year, the U.S. ranked a very impressive 4th when it came to per student public funding of K-12 education, but it only ranked a very abysmal 26th when it came to average student performance in math and reading

By Daniel Alman (aka Dan from Squirrel Hill)

February 20, 2023

I asked ChatGPT the following:

The 2018-2019 school year happened before COVID-19. For that particular school year, to the best of your knowledge, please list every OECD country, in order of the per student public funding for K-12 education. Please list the public funding per student, for each country, in U.S. dollars. Please start with the country that had the highest level of per student public funding, and continue with listing the countries in descending order of per student public funding. Then make a second list, where you list all of the OECD countries, in order, based on student performance in math and reading. Start with the country that had the best student performance, and continue with listing the countries in descending order of student performance. For all of this, use information from the 2018-2019 school year, and make it only for public funding of K-12 schools. Use whatever sources of information that are the most reliable. Please cite your sources.

This is how it responded: (Note from Daniel Alman: For some weird reason, Luxembourg appears on the first list, but not on the second. Furthermore, South Korea (which is just listed as “Korea”) and New Zealand both appear on the second list, but not on the first. Also, even though ChatGPT supposedly does not have internet access, it did include two links in its response. The first link is dead, and I could not find any archive of it. The second link works as of this writing. I suppose the first link may have worked at some point in the past.)

And now on with the response from ChatGPT:

Based on the information available to me, I can provide the following lists:

List of OECD countries by per student public funding for K-12 education (2018-2019)

1. Switzerland – $17,794

2. Norway – $16,548

3. Luxembourg – $15,958

4. United States – $15,421

5. Denmark – $14,675

6. Australia – $13,736

7. Netherlands – $12,425

8. Iceland – $11,624

9. Sweden – $11,573

10. Canada – $10,742

11. United Kingdom – $10,392

12. Austria – $10,155

13. Germany – $10,075

14. Belgium – $9,952

15. France – $9,683

16. Japan – $9,111

17. Italy – $8,700

18. Finland – $8,474

19. Spain – $7,699

20. Ireland – $7,645

21. Portugal – $6,711

22. Czech Republic – $5,729

23. Slovenia – $5,346

24. Israel – $4,779

25. Estonia – $4,512

26. Greece – $4,455

27. Poland – $4,400

28. Slovak Republic – $4,399

29. Turkey – $4,326

30. Hungary – $4,160

31. Mexico – $3,386

32. Chile – $3,247

33. Colombia – $2,594

34. Costa Rica – $2,350

Note: The data on per student public funding for K-12 education in each country is sourced from the OECD report “Education at a Glance 2021” (https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/education-at-a-glance-2021_69096873-en).

List of OECD countries by student performance in math and reading (2018-2019)

1. Japan

2. Estonia

3. Canada

4. Finland

5. Korea

6. Poland

7. Ireland

8. Slovenia

9. Netherlands

10. Switzerland

11. Australia

12. Belgium

13. Norway

14. Denmark

15. Germany

16. New Zealand

17. United Kingdom

18. France

19. Portugal

20. Sweden

21. Czech Republic

22. Austria

23. Spain

24. Italy

25. Slovak Republic

26. United States

27. Iceland

28. Greece

29. Israel

30. Turkey

31. Mexico

32. Chile

33. Hungary

34. Colombia

35. Costa Rica

Note: The data on student performance in math and reading is sourced from the OECD report “PISA 2018 Results” (https://www.oecd.org/pisa/publications/pisa-2018-results.htm). The countries are listed in descending order of their mean scores in math and reading.

This is Daniel Alman talking now. I can’t begin to count how many times I’ve heard liberals claim that U.S. K-12 public schools are “underfunded.” Of course, the liberals who make this claim never explain how so many other countries are able to do so much better with far less money. Whatever the problems are with U.S. public education, I don’t think that lack of money is one of them.