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

Do Rich and Poor Districts run Alike?(NCES 97-916) Ordering InformationThe right to a free and state-supported study has long been considered to be at the heart of the American perfection of equal opportunity for all. The importance placed on humans simple-minded and secondary education services is reflected in an annual cost of more or less $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 be allocated to students. One give of this interest is a long Mitigative and research history examimng the blood between access to universe education resources and community wealthiness (e.g., capital of Switzerland and Stiefel 1984).The purpose of this brief is to provide a govern view of this human relationship across all of the school zones of the nation for the 198990 school year. These findings are based on a Research and Development Report (Parrish, Matsumoto, and Fowler 1995) produced b y 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 frequent 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 repress of students per teacher. The first measure is in actual unadjusted dollars the second is an try of the relative power of those dollars to buy education resources and the third is a direct measure of arguably the most critical single education resource, the ratio of students to teachers. While dollars and students per teacher are direct measures of th e actual resources received by students, "buying power" is a new concept currently at a lower place 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 marked at the extremes of median household income (figure 1). The average public education expenditure in districts serving students in the nations poorest communities (i.