Do Rich and Poor Districts Spend Alike?
December 1996
IB-1-96
(NCES 97-916) Ordering Information
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 resource ...