The reality of school district spending

by Alan Bonsteel

In the last decade, the school choice movement has succeeded in the unmasking of falsifications of dropout rates by school districts and the loss of almost one-third of our children before graduating from high school. The contrast with the far lower dropout rates in schools of choice is now the most powerful weapon in the armory of the school choice movement.

However, there remains another falsification that is also crucially important to the school choice battle, and that is the phony per-student spending rates that districts release.

Those phony per-student spending rates only rarely include interest on school bonds or public school employee retirement allocations. Such partial spending numbers are referred to by the public school establishment as “current” spending rates, as opposed to the “total” spending rates that the public rarely sees, and which are typically about 30 percent higher. These misleading numbers, combined with disinformation about private school and charter school spending rates, have left the public with the impression that private schools spend far more per student than do public schools, and that charter schools spend about the same. Of course, if the public fully realized that the superior records of private and charter schools were achieved with far less funding, the many successes we are seeing in school choice would turn into full rout of the opposition.

Equally important along with per-student spending rates is the direction of spending, which, of course, has surged dramatically upward for more than a half-century.

The organization of which I am president, California Parents for Educational Choice, has close ties to the American Center for School Choice. Our two signature issues have long been dropout rates and per-student spending rates, with much game-changing research on both issues having been done by Carl Brodt, a certified management accountant and our treasurer.

CPEC was very proud of its fruitful association with Dr. Milton Friedman, who long served on our advisory board. When Friedman wrote Capitalism and Freedom in 1956 and launched the concept of school vouchers, he did not realize the inaccuracies in public school spending rates. He later acknowledged that despite being a Nobel Prize recipient, and despite his suspicion of government truthfulness, he did not realize in reading the U.S. government’s Digest of Educational Statistics that the numbers he was looking at were dramatic understatements across the board.

In 2001, Carl Brodt and I persuaded a newly-Republican U.S. Department of Education to add a new table of total per student spending that included each state, still in existence as Table 160 in that national reference, and to make more clear which numbers were “total” and which “current” and what the distinctions were.

Excited and hopeful that this would be another breakthrough like dropout rates, we mailed press releases and op-eds to all of the nation’s major newspapers. The only newspaper to publish this data was the Placerville, Calif., daily, a gold mining town in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

Getting this reality out has remained a challenge. Perhaps the only long-tern solution will be for unreservedly pro-school choice presidents and governors to keep putting out this data to the public until reality sets in.

The payoff in our quest to help children, however, remains obvious, and a continued campaign to get truthful per student spending rates to the public remains key to any comprehensive plan to winning the school choice war.