he really is missing something and this is not at all evidence of waste.
To quote a different commenter:
The jury has been in for decades on spending; it simply doesn’t make a difference. So when you see spending so conspicuously out of whack, you don’t expect Wyoming to be better, you ask what is different about Wyoming.
If you are familiar with the literature you know this is basically true.
I am not familiar with the literature on education, but there’s a matter of causal inference that I do feel able to comment on, if only hypothetically.
The quoted assertion that the amount spent made little difference does not follow from the fact that Wyoming spends twice as much as Utah for similar results. One cannot conclude absence of causation from absence of correlation alone, without considering confounding factors. One such factor was mentioned by another commenter there, already referenced by the commenter you quoted: the population of Wyoming is much more rurally scattered. This would make even the same education cost more to provide.
To take a limiting and hypothetical case, if every school is aiming to reach a certain uniform standard, the better they actually succeed at that by varying their expenditure, the less visible dependence there will be between educational expenditure and educational results.
If I emigrated to Alaska, I expect I would have to spend much more on heating my house than I do at present. But my indoor temperatures would end up much the same. That does not mean that the extra money I spent was wasted. It just means that it is colder in Alaska.
To quote a different commenter:
If you are familiar with the literature you know this is basically true.
I am not familiar with the literature on education, but there’s a matter of causal inference that I do feel able to comment on, if only hypothetically.
The quoted assertion that the amount spent made little difference does not follow from the fact that Wyoming spends twice as much as Utah for similar results. One cannot conclude absence of causation from absence of correlation alone, without considering confounding factors. One such factor was mentioned by another commenter there, already referenced by the commenter you quoted: the population of Wyoming is much more rurally scattered. This would make even the same education cost more to provide.
To take a limiting and hypothetical case, if every school is aiming to reach a certain uniform standard, the better they actually succeed at that by varying their expenditure, the less visible dependence there will be between educational expenditure and educational results.
If I emigrated to Alaska, I expect I would have to spend much more on heating my house than I do at present. But my indoor temperatures would end up much the same. That does not mean that the extra money I spent was wasted. It just means that it is colder in Alaska.