Show Me the (Education) Money, Part II!

Last week Iput up a post with charts showing total, per-pupil, public school spending between the 1999-00 and 2014-15 school years, as well as breaking out spending for a handful of states facing notable education unrest. Due to popular demand —if that’s what you call very mild comments from a few people on Twitter and Facebook—this post is going to break that spending into numerous subcategories used by the federal government inthe tables that formed the bases for most of the charts. This post will only look at aggregate national data, but next week I ’ll break down spending for those embattled states. Looking at this inflation-adjusted chart, you can get a sense for how big numerous components of spending are relative to each other, and how they have moved over the 15-period. I won ’t define all the categories—indeed, thefederal definitions themselves are not entirely clear —but the two biggest ones that people are most likely to be interested in are “instruction,” which includes really important things like teacher and principal pay, and “capital outlay,” which covers costs for things such as acquiring property and new buildings. Also important are “studen t support services” and “other support services,” which include compensation for people like guidance counselors and speech pathologists, and costs for business support services.Overall we see the same trend as previously: spending up between 99-00 and 07-08, down between 07-08 and 12-13, t...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs