School Budgets: The Worst Education Money Can Buy
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The Fiscal Times
June 6, 2011

Which public school district spends the most taxpayer money per student? One in Beverly Hills, perhaps? Or one  in the swanky Park Avenue area of Manhattan?

Actually, it’s a district in Camden, N.J., according to new Census data on public school spending. Best known for urban blight and local corruption, Camden has an unemployment rate of 17 percent and 35 percent of its 80,000 inhabitants live below the poverty line. Fifty percent of residents are black, 15.5 percent white, 2.6 percent Asian; 10,000 people are crammed into each square mile. In 2008, the Federal Bureau of Investigation ranked it as the most dangerous city in America.

Camden High School, with an enrollment of 1,200 students, has less than a 40 percent graduation rate, and the former district chief of security Thomas Hewes-Eddinger has called it a “mini-jail.” Yet the district spends $23,356 per student, more than twice the national average.

Nearly 2,200 miles away lies the opposite example: the lowest-cost school district . Alpine school district is located in American Fork, Utah, a town of 27,000 people at the foot of Mount Timpanogos. The racial makeup is 95 percent white, 0.16 percent black and 0.65 percent Asian. The town’s median household income is $52,000; 4 percent of the population lives below the poverty line. The district spends a mere $5,658 per student, nearly half the national average, and has a 78 percent graduation rate.

Although they represent the extremes, these very different districts illustrate a troubling pattern that emerges in the school-spending data: The 10 most expensive schools have some of the lowest graduations rates, and the 10 schools that spend the least per student have some of the highest. Trenton, N.J., the third most expensive district ($20,663 per student), has a 41 percent graduation rate. New York City, number seven on the most expensive list ($19,146), is at 51 percent, 26 percent lower than the national average. While there are examples of school districts that spend relatively little and get a big bang for their bucks, including many districts in Massachusetts, the data, which was released last week, raises disturbing questions about how states spend education dollars. The data comes from the 2009 Census of Government Finances and covers public school spending during the 2008-2009 school year and revenue from federal, state and local sources in districts with enrollments of 10,000 or more. 

“We’re not going to spend the same on students from disadvantaged backgrounds as students in the suburbs,” says Ulrich Boser, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who recently led a study called Return on Educational Investment, “but when you look across the U.S., we see that some schools are able to do more with less. In this time of sagging budgets, we should be engaged in thoughtful reform and make sure that we’re focusing on student achievement, and not spending more for policies that don’t show an actual impact on the ground.”

Many factors can contribute to high per pupil costs. The cost of living varies widely across the nation, as do teacher’s salaries. New York and California, two relatively expensive states , have the highest average teacher salaries at $69,118 and $68,093, respectively. The national average is $54,319, according to the National Education Association. Utah ($42,335) and North Dakota ($41,654) have the lowest salaries.

Blaire Briody is a contributing editor at The Fiscal Times. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Popular Science, Publishers Weekly, among others.