Sorry to revive an old topic, but there's one more factor in the education space that I want to point out for where the money goes: Supplies, textbooks, and digital resources. 

These companies are often duopolies or have resisted disruption over the course of the past few years, and work hard to build a closed ecosystem as much as possible. Textbooks didn't get upgraded with anything fresh for years, ctrl+c, ctrl+v for too many of the editions. 

I don't have any numbers for this next bit, just anecdotal evidence: Google Classroom is eating everyone for lunch, but there were a lot of folks who were shockingly bad at implementing it pre pandemic. There's a lot of resource bloat, underutilization, and scattered focus in the urban education field. If the district buys NewsELA for everyone, but the teachers only use it 5 times a year, is that optimal? Discovery education? Phet (amazing free resources) means that I'll only go to those pages a few times. What makes the most sense?

Focus, consistency, retention, and discernment do wonders in the education field, but it doesn't scale all that effectively.