How is America doing at educating our children? You might want to take a look at the results of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA).

If you turn to page 53, you'll see that in mathematics skills of 15-year olds, the US ranks 34th in the world, behind much poorer countries like Slovenia, Latvia and Azerbaijan:

PISA Results

But despite its sorry performance in international comparisons, the United States is the uncontested spending world champion among all the large countries:

USA Today: U.S. tops the world in school spending

Now let's look at where some of the education dollars end up in the biggest spending state.

In New Jersey, some superintendents in the poorest school districts receive over $400,000 in compensation for a single year. "The Cartel" show cases of public school janitors making over $100,000/year.

But none of that's new -- it's just not widely known. In March 2006, the New Jersey Commission of Investigation reported on questionable and hidden compensation for public school administrators. It was prophetically titled, "Taxpayers Beware."

The findings include inflated compensation/benefits, bloated severance packages/"buy-outs," pension manipulation, obstacles to public disclosure, and lax oversight. See for yourself:

Taxpayers Beware

But the problem is broader than administrator compensation. In 2007, the New Jersey Department of Education commissioned a performance audit of district operations across the state. The KPMG audit questioned more than $83 million in spending in the state's Abbott Districts. The auditors concluded more than 25 cents of every dollar spent by the districts was unnecessary, excessive or lacking documentation.

For example, the KPMG report on the Jersey City School District contained this:

At the direction of the Department, we conducted a “desk review” of a sample of purchase orders charged to particular program, function and object codes. Of the 304 transactions selected, 91 appear questionable based on the review of the purchase order packages provided.

They're all available here: Individual district audits

How could so much money be wasted? Consider this: In July, 2008, it was learned that the public school superintendent from Keansburg, a poor, so-called "Abbott" district with exactly one high school, would be retiring with a severance of over $740,000, as well as an annual pension of $120,000. The NJ Star-Ledger Editorial board called it an "outrage": School Payout is an Outrage

Still individual anecdotes and the corresponding outrages don't create structural change by themselves. As long as the original system that created them remains intact, students, parents and taxpayers should expect more of the same.

Here are some fun facts about New Jersey's overall education spending per student; it's the number one spending state:

Spending Per Pupil, by State

And yet if you examine average SAT scores by state, the big-spending NJ comes in at a dismal 37th:

SAT Scores, by State