Financial Day of Reckoning for Public Education Hasn’t Hit Some States

posted at 5:02 pm on July 16, 2012 by Mike Antonucci

It’s 2012, but we are only now beginning to receive comprehensive data about how the recession, delayed by the stimulus package and the edujobs bill, affected K-12 public education.

Last month the U.S. Census Bureau released its annual report on public school revenues and expenditures. It covered the 2009-10 school year. Read in concert with data from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics Common Core of Data, we can examine how funding and staffing were impacted by tightened state budgets.

Looking at the nation as a whole, it appears the years of substantial growth in spending and hiring came to a grinding halt. The number of full-time equivalent K-12 teachers actually fell by about 38,000 – something that hasn’t happened in recent memory. Per-pupil spending grew by 1.1 percent – short of the inflation rate for 2010. Enrollment was essentially flat, growing by only 3,800 students nationwide.

Fourteen states experienced an actual cut in per-pupil spending in 2009-10 (Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Kansas, Maine, Minnesota, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Utah, Virginia and Washington) spanning the geographic and political spectrum.

Though it is clear that the lean years were underway, not every state suffered. Twenty-three states had a larger teacher workforce in 2010 than in 2009. And of those, eight were simultaneously experiencing a drop in K-12 enrollment (Idaho, Illinois, Missouri, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota and West Virginia).

Annual figures can spike in either direction, so I have constructed a table of the 50 states that examines enrollment, hiring and labor costs over a five-year period (I will eventually update figures for each of America’s more than 13,000 school districts).

From 2005 to 2010, student enrollment increased a cumulative 0.3 percent, while the K-12 teacher workforce increased 3.8 percent. Per-pupil spending increased 22 percent (about 9.3% after correcting for inflation). Spending on education employee salaries and benefits increased 22.3 percent.

It seems safe to assume that just as the cuts to education lagged behind the fall in the economy, so too will resumed growth in education budgets lag behind an economic recovery. These numbers are likely to get much worse before they get better.

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