How much does your state on K-12 education compared with others? The U.S. Census Bureau has the goods.
Here’s the home page for education-spending numbers, but you may need to head over to this page and then look for the text “Public Elementary-Secondary Education Finances” to pick from the annual reports. The reports, by the way, start in 1992 and go through 2005.
Since there’s some production lag time, the numbers in the 50-state reports are typically a couple years old. But unless you have a full-time research assistant who can dig out the information for you, they’re as good as it gets.
You can get the information in either PDF or Excel. You can also look at all states, or just a specific state, as the page for 2005 reveals.
Here are a few points that stand out from the 2005 edition, which was released in April, 2007:
Nationally, 47 percent of all public school revenue comes through state governments, 44 percent from local governments, and 9 percent from the federal government.
Only 85 percent of all spending is for current operations (the rest is on capital outlay and “other,” which I think means debt). Of current operations spending, 55 percent is on “instruction,” meaning that only 47 percent of all spending is actually on instruction.
The amount of money spent varies tremendously. In New York, schools spend $14,119 per student. Utah spends $5,257. (Utah, by the way, has much better student achievement.) The national average is $8,701.
Dig into the spreadsheet version of Table 8, and you can figure out which states load up compensation with benefits, such as gold-plated health insurance and retirement plans.
There’s always something to cherry-pick. Some people will turn to Table 12, which ranks states according to how much they spend on schools as a percentage of personal income.
Since we’re dealing with the provision of services almost entirely without the benefit of a market, it’s hard to say what is the “right” amount of money to spend on schooling.