Fun With Numbers: A More Nuanced Look at Public School Budget Numbers

I'm hardly a defender of public schools bureaucracy and ineffectiveness, in DC and elsewhere. Fred Siegel's The Future Once Happened Here is a great discussion of the decline of various municipal institutions, including schools. (The book uses case studies of New York, Washington, and Los Angeles as a means to illustrate his points.)



But the way most people analyze the Schools budget, usually taking the total budget figure and dividing it by the number of students to get an average amount spent per student, is deceptive, in DC and elsewhere. (An example of this overly facile calculation is in the short piece "High Tax Assessments A[n]d City Services" by Harrison Wilder on page 123 of the April issue of the Hill Rag.)

Most urban school districts spend a significant amount of their budgets on special education. This amount is about 1/3 of the total budget. About 10% of the student population qualifies for such services. Therefore, to get a more accurate indication of spending per student, one needs to subtract these figures and recalculate.

Say DC has a schools budget of $700 million and 65,000 students. (These are really rough numbers, I haven't kept up on the exact figures, although one good source is the DCPS Watch website that is a companion to DC's premier good government website DC Watch.) A simple calculation using these numbers yields an average amount spent per pupil of approximately $11,000.

Subtract the portion related to special education, and the non-special education schools budget is approximately $469 million and the non-special education enrollment figure is 58,500. This yields a per pupil average of a handful of dollars more than $8,000--still a lot of money, but about 1/3 less than the figure that most people tend to bandy about.

[For a mind boggling number, I suggest you divide $231 million by 6,500.]

I raise this because unless one has a nuanced and complete understanding of such issues, one's analysis isn't likely to yield useful insights and an agenda for change and action. And you're certainly going to be at a competitive disadvantage with the "bureaucrats" when you're trying to make something happen.