San Francisco schooling district spends upwards of $1B a year to educate 55k students. About 85% of the budget goes to salary and benefits (excluding pensions). Of that, 75% goes to educators and the rest for other staff.

Cost of living is the primary driver for cost of education everywhere.

It affects the minimum viable salary for a teacher to even be able to live in the city where you want to hire them to work, same for all the other support staff that make a school function.

High housing cost means teachers need higher salaries to account for either their higher cost of living or the extra commute

It’s because this is a very simplified view of a classroom. What is presented above is the best case scenario, not a realistic one. For example, there’s no consideration of costs associated with any sort of handicapped student, or student with special education needs.

Real world costs completely spiral out of control when you look at the actual system—for example, the buildings are all built during the rapid expansion of the country so are now old enough to need expensive maintenance, and there isn’t money or interest from the community to tear them down and build new ones.

Also something else that isn’t being covered is that involved parents are pulling their kids out for home schooling, and well behaved kids are increasingly being pulled out and put in charter sschools. This is leading to a rapid collapse of the school system. Public school is being left as a place for students who’s parents don’t care enough to do anything with them, or with enough behavioral or special needs that charter schools won’t handle them.

Very possibly. All I'm saying is you can't just compare dollar figures per student without considering where the dollars are spent.

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The big thing you’re missing is special education, and to a lesser extent English Language Learners. School districts are obligated to teach every student, some of whom cost the district dramatically more than they receive from the state.

Your admin costs are also low - you need to account for each teacher being coached and managed, running school operations and front desk, facilities management, finance, IT, etc.

Also this is an area where first principles analysis is likely to lead you astray - I’d recommend starting with SFUSD’s public budget to understand what their cost structure is.

Finally, I have no idea where people are getting $28k/year; most schools in CA operate on closer to $14k-$16k per pupil

As the son of a teacher and a friend of several teachers, you're way underestimating their workload.