RSSExpenditures for U.S. Elementary and Secondary Schools 1981-2007
Since 1981, the amount spent on elementary and secondary education (K through 12) in the United States has risen from just over $100 billion to almost $600 billion in 2007. This is slightly more than the total of Social Security payments ($581 billion) in the same year. These institutions are funded by federal, state and local taxes, as well as private tuition. Although expenditures have increased almost 600% during the past 27 years, expenditures as a percentage of the Gross Domestic Product have fluctuated within a narrow band of 3.9% to 4.7% of GDP. The chart indicates that for the school year ended in 2007, expenditures totaled approximately $599 billion, which represented 4.5% of GDP for the year.
6 Responses to “Expenditures for U.S. Elementary and Secondary Schools 1981-2007”
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June 16th, 2008 at 6:37 pm
This past year I tried to enroll my 4 year old in Kindergarten at our local public school. Although was old enough to start Kindergarten in all the other surrounding school districts, she missed the cutoff date by one week. When we asked for an exemption so that she could attend Kindergarten with her friends, the school district required that she be able to perform reading, writing and arithmetic at the level expected at the end of 1st grade in order to be accepted for Kindergarten. Rather than dwell on what the public school would be doing for her for two years if she were already at that level, I looked for alternatives. I found two and enrolled her in one of them.
That was ten months ago. Now my little girl is 5, has completed Kindergarten and is reading, writing and calculating at the level expected at the end of 1st grade in our public school. We sent her half-days to a private school, which cost us $2,500. If she had been accepted by the public school, it would have cost the taxpayers a little over $10,000 (average cost per public school student). So she got a superior education at greatly reduced cost and only had to go half-days, by going to a private school instead of a public school.
There are two other big differences we have noticed in the public school vs private school choice. Our daughter’s vocabulary is seriously deficient in the kind of four letter words that are in common and frequent usage amongst junior high school students on public school buses. The other difference is that she was not forbidden to think or talk about God.
So why don’t we 1) get the U.S. government out of public education and 2) transfer education funds to private and charter schools, where it will be more effectively used?
June 17th, 2008 at 7:48 am
It should be worth noting that this chart is scaled in CURRENT DOLLARS, which means the values are NOT adjusted for inflation. I would personally like to see this same chart rendered using CONSTANT DOLLARS, which are adjusted to account for inflation. Many people do not understand the difference between “current dollars” and “constant dollars,” as the terms look and sound very similar. In reality, the two terms are vastly different.
To illustrate this, here’s the URL for a chart showing the U.S. minimum wage from 1955 until 2007, shown in current AND constant (1996) dollars:
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0774473.html
To put this into perspective, consider that a gallon of gasoline was about $1.00 in 1981, but is over $4.00 today. Diesel fuel and heating oil have also risen massively. Using “current dollars,” we’d see a sharp rise in education spending just from the cost of running buses and heating classrooms, not to mention the cost of paying teachers AND the increase in the number of students due to the 35% rise in our population between 1981 and today. In 1980 the average teacher salary in the US was about $16,000 in current dollars, a figure which today would be well below the poverty line.
Statistics and charts are fascinating and can be highly informative, but they can also be misleading, depending on how the information is presented. This chart seems to support the idea that education costs in the US have skyrocketed since 1981, when in reality this is not the case. A more honest chart would document average per-pupil spending in the US from 1981 to 2007, shown in constant (2007) dollars, with an evenly-scaled vertical axis starting at zero. I think the visual image presented would be significantly different.
June 17th, 2008 at 9:15 am
neo-malthusian, the intent of the chart was not to show that “spending on education has sky rocketed” because it has not. We chose to demonstrate this by showing that spending on education, as a percentage of gross domestic product has been relatively constant within a narrow band. In other words, spending on education has grown no faster than the economy as a whole.
We think that’s easier for people to understand than constant dollars. But your points are essentially correct and we may add some constant dollar charts to the presentation in the future.
June 17th, 2008 at 10:17 am
Thank you for responding to my post. I’m not suggesting the chart was deliberately intended to mislead (and you rightly point out that by showing education spending as a % of GDP, you do show that spending has been essentially stable). It’s just potentially confusing when the quantities listed on your two vertical scales (the value of the US dollar versus the value of 1% of the U.S. GDP) have very different levels of variability from 1981 to 2007.
My concern was about what an average person might conclude by looking at this chart, especially if their understanding of key economic concepts and terminology is lacking.
I appreciate your willingness to add some constant dollar charts, and I look forward to seeing them. I know it takes a lot of time and effort to put together a site like this, and I’m glad to see this information on the Web.
June 22nd, 2008 at 8:10 am
Inflation adjusted school spending has doubled over the last few decades and as far as GDP goes it’s like the government telling us about inflation, a joke.
A realistic chart would be the percentage of personal income going to fund education, like the average joe used to make $20,000 and $1,000 of it was feed into education through taxes and now say the average Joe makes $40,000 and $3,000 is taken away to fund education.
Not many people would need to look at a chart to figure out their property taxes are eating up a bigger percentage of their income to fund all the frills and waste so people can stuff their pockets all in the name of the children. Add the average joe has been creamed by inflation and their real after tax income has shrunk.
Blue collar people haven’t gotten a raise in decades, their earnings have been eaten up by inflation while property taxes cream them even more.
February 21st, 2010 at 12:35 am
Regarding post #1… A different pool of children attend private schools than those who attend public schools. The parents that can afford to pay private school tuition are more highly skilled and paid (or received larger inheritances) than the average public school parent. So claiming that privately run charter schools operate more efficiently than their public counterparts doesn’t take into account the difference in student demographics. I think most private schools would struggle to excel with a whole classroom full of kids from their neighboring public school. My concern with the rapid expansion of charter schools is that they would not collaborate and attain the economies of scale that can be reached with a larger organization such as a state school system. On the flip side, the state school systems (at least in California) squander most of their potential economies of scale by having far too many district offices full of redundant bureaucrats.
If you normalize school performance with socioeconomic status of the parents, the outcomes are pretty similar. Try correlating % of students on free lunch to state testing scores for public schools in your region (schooldigger.com is has the data). You’ll find that there are a lot of great public schools… it just so happens that there is no low rent housing within the their zoning maps. So my point is basically that private schools aren’t really the solution to handling the glut of students who are economically disadvantaged. If public schools didn’t have to admit the economically disadvantaged, they wouldn’t have any problems either.
I’m not certain what the recipe for success is but I believe it has something to do with informing the schools what type of jobs will be left in the USA by the time their students graduate.