Ed Data: Per pupil spending by school district in the United States
At the end of March, the Hoboken school board voted to increase taxes by 4 percent to pay for the school budget, which spends $23,716 per student, the second highest in the state of New Jersey. It struck me how much school spending has changed since I went to school, when wealthier districts consistently spent more on education than poor districts. In New Jersey, for example, the state kicks in money to help raise the performance of 31 poor communities.
I got to wondering what per pupil spending is across the nation and how it varies with income and achievement. As a first step, I wanted to calculate per pupil spending in each district throughout the United States. The Census Bureau publishes a table of per pupil spending in districts over 10,000 students. (See Table 17 in Public Education Finances: 2010 -- published in June 2012). But that threshold is too high to look at spending in the nation’s wealthiest districts with fewer students, such as Scarsdale, NY with 4718 students or Beverly Hills, CA with 4943 students.
A U.S. census statistician directed me to a data set from FY 2010 (http://www.census.gov/govs/school/) that lists the total current spending for elementary, middle and high school students in each school district in the