Clueless about Education Spending? You're Not Alone

Most Americans do not know how much their local school districts are spending on education, according to a new national survey. This isn't a surprise to Ed Money Watch. Poor understanding of education expenditures spurred the creation of our Federal Education Budget Project. But what does surprise us is the size of the misinformation gap: Americans vastly underestimate per-pupil expenditures, by $6,122 on average.

Education Next and the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard conducted a survey in 2007 of a nationally representative sample of 2,000 American adults. They asked the question: "Based on your best guess, what is the average amount of money spent each year for a child in the public schools in your school district?" Then they matched those answers to the actual per-pupil expenditures of the respondents' districts.

The average per-pupil expenditure of the districts in the sample was $10,353 (slightly higher than the actual national average of $9,435). The average estimate collected by the survey was $4,231, and the median estimate was only $2,000. More than 40 percent of the respondents guessed that their districts' per-pupil expenditures were $1,000 or less.

Then, in an attempt to make sure the respondents understood the full range of costs included in per-pupil expenditures, the survey gave a prompt to half of the respondents: "Individual student costs go toward teacher and administrator salaries, building construction and maintenance, extracurricular activities, transportation, etc." While the average estimate did increase by about $1,000 to $5,262, it was still off by $5,138. And the median remained at $2,000, and more than one-third of the respondents still guessed less than $1,000.

The survey also uncovered large underestimates for teacher salaries—actual salary spending was $47,424 per-teacher on average, while the respondents' average estimate was $33,054. Not quite as far off as the expenditure guesses, but still underestimated by 30 percent (vs. per-pupil expenditures underestimated by 59 percent without the prompt and 50 percent with the prompt).

We started our Federal Education Budget Project to dispel myths about education spending by distributing facts and data. A large part of this effort involved creating an interactive website that allows anyone to look up federal funding, achievement, and demographics data for every school district in the country. This new survey highlights the need to better inform parents and taxpayers about the realities of expenditures on schools.

Check out http://www.EdBudgetProject.org/ to look up your school district's per-pupil expenditures, including how much it receives from the federal government in Title I funding for low-income students and IDEA funding for students with disabilities. You can compare your district to others in your state, and you can compare your state to the nation. The results are often eye-opening.