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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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.