Do Rich and Poor Districts Spend Alike? :: essays research papers

Do Rich and Poor Districts Spend Alike?(NCES 97-916) Ordering trainingThe right to a free and humanity learning has want been considered to be at the heart of the American ideal of equal opportunity for all. The grandeur placed on public elementary and secondary precept run is reflected in an annual expenditure of approximately $250 billion. Given the magnitude of this investment, it is non surprising that there is also a great deal of please in how these dollars atomic number 18 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 yield a direct view of this relationship across all of the civilize districts of the nation for the 198990 school year. These findings are based on a Research and Development Report (Parrish, Matsumoto, and Fowler 1995) produced by the National Center f or knowledge Statistics. Since this research is intended to be developmental in nature, these resuks should be considered tentative and suggestive. Although different appraises of community wealth and public education resources may be used, in this analysis community wealth is defined as the median(a) income of the fellowships 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 " procureing power," and the average number of students per teacher. The first measure is in actual unadjusted dollars the second is an count on of the relative power of those dollars to buy education resources and the third is a direct measure of arguably the nearly critical single education resource, the ratio of students to teachers. While dollars and students per teacher are direct measures of the actu al 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 nations poorest communities (i.