Do Rich and Poor Districts Spend Alike?

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Recommended: Unequal funding in public schools

Do Rich and Poor Districts Spend Alike?

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The right to a free and public education has long been considered to be at the heart of the American ideal of equal opportunity for all. The importance placed on public elementary and secondary education services is reflected in an annual expenditure of approximately $250 billion. Given the magnitude of this investment, it is not surprising that there is also a great deal of interest in how these dollars are allocated to students. One result of this interest is a long Mitigative and research history examimng the relationship between access to public education resources and community wealth (e.g., Berne and Stiefel 1984).

The purpose of this brief is to provide a direct view of this relationship across all of the school districts of the nation for the 1989–90 school year. These findings are based on a Research and Development Report (Parrish, Matsumoto, and Fowler 1995) produced by the National Center for Education Statistics. Since this research is intended to be developmental in nature, these resuks should be considered tentative and suggestive. Although different measures of community wealth and public education resources may be used, in this analysis community wealth is defined as the median income of the households located within school district boundaries./1 This measure of wealth is compared to three alternative measures of the resources available to public schools in the district. These are expenditures per student, expenditures converted to education "buying power," and the average number of students per teacher. The first measure is in actual unadjusted dollars; the second is an estimate of the relative power of those dollars to buy education resources; and the third is a direct measure of arguably the most critical single education resource, the ratio of students to teachers. While dollars and students per teacher are direct measures of the actual resources received by students, "buying power" is a new concept currently under development by the education research community. These three measures represent a progression from the dollars available for students, to an estimate of the relative power of those dollars to buy education resources, to a direct measure of those resources.

Districts with high-income households have more to spend for public education.

Differences in public education spending are most pronounced at the extremes of median household income (figure 1). The average public education expenditure in districts serving students in the nation's poorest communities (i.

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