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Patricia Buscher CB02-69 Public Information Office (301) 457-3030/457-3670 (301) 457-1037 (TDD) e-mail: pio@census.gov New Jersey and New York Spent Most Per Pupil on Education, Census Bureau Reports New Jersey and New York led all states in the amount of money spent per pupil on elementary and secondary education in 2000, according to the Commerce Department's Census Bureau. The following table shows per-pupil expenditures in 2000 for the United States and the top five states or state equivalents: 2000 1999 Change Spending Spending Dollars Percent State Per Pupil Per Pupil United States $ 6,835 $ 6,458 $377 5.8% New Jersey 10,283 10,230 53 0.5% New York 10,039 9,373 666 7.1% District of Columbia 9,933 9,645 288 3.0% Connecticut 8,800 8,632 168 1.9% Alaska 8,743 8,472 271 3.2% Other findings in the new tabulations include: -- State governments contributed the greatest share of total public elementary and secondary school funding: $186 billion. They were followed by local governments at $161 billion and the federal government, $27 billion. -- Public school systems spent $380.4 billion, up $25.8 billion from 1999. About $198 billion was spent on instruction, $109 billion for services that support instruction,$45 billion for capital outlay and $28 billion for other non-instructional expenditures. -- School districts invested $32 billion in school construction, up 12 percent. -- School district debt reached $178 billion, an increase of 8 percent. Texas, Wisconsin, New York and California borrowed more than $1.8 billion each for building construction,reconstruction and refinancing. The tabulations from the 2000 Annual Survey of Local Government Finances School Systems provide financial data for public elementary and secondary education. They contain data on revenue, expenditure and debt for individual public elementary and secondary school systems with enrollments of 15,000 pupils or more. Also included are state rankings of per-pupil amounts of elementary-secondary school revenues and expenditures and rankings based on the relation of elementary-secondary revenues and expenditures to state personal income. Data for this report come from all elementary and secondary school systems and are not subject to sampling error. Quality assurance procedures were applied to all phases of collection, processing and tabulation to minimize errors. However, the data are still subject to possible error from miscoding and difficulties in identifying which units should be included in the report.
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