Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
7 Figures: U.S. school districts spending per pupil
7 Figures: U.S. school districts spending per pupil
Jan 20, 2026 2:47 PM

Earlier this week the U.S. Census Bureau released a report that reveals how much U.S. school districts spend per pupil. Here are seven figures from the report you should know:

1. The amount spent per pupil for public elementary and secondary education (prekindergarten through 12th grade) for all 50 states and the District of Columbia increased by 3.7 percent to $12,201 per pupil during the 2017 fiscal pared to $11,763 per pupil in 2016, according to new tables released today by the U.S. Census Bureau.

2. The top five school systems with the largest enrollment were New York City (984,462), Los Angeles (633, 621), Chicago (378,199), Miami-Dade County, FL (357,249), and Clark County NV (326,953).

3. Of the 100 largest school systems based on enrollment, the five school systems with the highest spending per pupil in 2017 were New York City School District in New York ($25,199), Boston City Schools in Massachusetts ($22,292), Baltimore City Schools in Maryland ($16,184), Montgomery County School District in Maryland ($16,109), and Howard County School District in Maryland ($15,921)

4. Maryland had four of the top 10 school systems school districts with the highest spending per pupil.

5. The public school systems that received the highest percentage of their revenues from the federal government were New Mexico (14.4 percent), Mississippi (14.1 percent), Alaska (14.0 percent), Arizona (13.7 percent), and South Dakota (12.8 percent).

6. The public school systems that received the highest percentage of their revenues from the federal government were New Jersey (4.1 percent), Massachusetts (4.3 percent), Connecticut (4.3 percent), Minnesota (5.2 percent) and New York (5.3 percent).

7. In 2017, public elementary and secondary education revenue, from all sources, amounted to $694.1 billion, up 3.4 percent from $671.2 billion in 2016.

Note: These e from the 2017Annual Survey of School System Finances.You can find more information about individual school districts at that link.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Herman Bavinck on the Glory of Motherhood
Happy Mother’s Day weekend from Herman Bavinck, who poetically summarizes the work, beauty, and glory of motherhood in The Christian Family: [The wife and mother] organizes the household, arranges and decorates the home, and supplies the tone and texture of home life; with unequaled talent she magically transforms a cold room into a cozy place, transforms modest e into sizable capital, and despite all kinds of statistical predictions, she uses limited means to generate great things. Within the family she...
American higher education: Where free speech goes to die
You’ve heard of that mythical place where elephants go to die? Apparently, these giants “know” they are going to die, and they head off to a place known only to them. Free speech in the United States goes off to die as well, but there is no myth surrounding this. Free speech dies in our colleges and universities. Just ask American Enterprise Institute’s Christina Sommers. Sommers is a former philosophy professor and AEI scholar who recently spoke at Oberlin College....
L’Engle and the Church
This week the University Bookman published an essay in which I reflect on some of the lessons we can learn from Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, especially related to the recent discovery of an excised section. L’Engle, I argue, is part of a longer tradition of classical conservative thought running, in the modern era, from Burke to Kirk. Although L’Engle’s narrative vision is drenched in Christianity, she is often thought of holding to a rather liberal, rather than traditional...
Mani, Pedi, Human Slavery
For many of us ladies, getting our nails done is a regular bit of pampering. We stop off at the local nail salon, grab a magazine and relax while someone paints our nails. We pay our $25 and off we go. We never, for one moment, consider the person doing our nails could be a slave. For those who study human trafficking, nail salons have long been held as a hotspot for trafficking victims. But for the average client, the...
The Problem With Urban Progressive Part-Time Freedom Lovers
Since the 1950s, the modern conservative movement has been marked by “fusionism”—a mix of various groups, most notably traditional conservatives and libertarians. For the next fifty years a conservative Christian and a secular libertarian (or vice versa) could often mon ground by considering how liberty lead to human flourishing. But for the past decade a different fusionist arrangement has been tried (or at least desired) which includes progressives and libertarians. Brink Lindsey coined the term “liberaltarians” in 2006 to describe...
Do Government Welfare Programs ‘Subsidize’ Low Wage Employers?
As Elise pointed out earlier today, economist Donald pletely eviscerates former Labor Secretary Robert Reich’s call to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. As Boudreaux says, “Reich’s video is infected, from start to finish, with too many other errors to count.” But Boudreaux also wrote a letter to Reich countering the economically ignorant (though increasingly popular!) claim that “we subsidize low wage employers” like Wal-Mart, McDonald’s, and almost every mom-and-pop business in America through government welfare programs...
Athenians and Visigoths: Neil Postman’s Graduation Speech
While it could be argued that youth is wasted on the young, it is indisputable mencement addresses are wasted on young graduates. Sitting in a stuffy auditorium waiting to receive a parchment that marks the beginning of one’s student loan repayments is not the most conducive atmosphere for soaking up wisdom. Insight, which can otherwise seep through the thickest of skulls, cannot pierce mortarboard. Most colleges and universities recognize this fact and schedule the graduation speeches accordingly. Schools regularly choose...
Sex Trafficking CAN Be Eliminated
There are few things more horrifying than the sexual exploitation of a child. Perhaps it is made even worse to think that those who are meant to protect the child (parents, police, court officials) plicit in the harm of that child. No place on Earth was worse than Cambodia. But that has changed. According to International Justice Mission (IJM), Cambodian officials have said, “No more,” and they meant it. In the early 2000s, the Cambodian government estimated that 30 percent...
Religious Activists Lose Another Battle Against GMOs
As You Sow (AYS), a shareholder activist group, was rebuffed last month in a move to curtail the use of Abbott Laboratories’ genetically modified organisms in its Similac Soy Isomil infant formulas. The defeat of the resolution marks the third year Abbott shareholders voted down an AYS effort to limit and/or label GMO ingredients by significant margins. This year’s resolution reportedly garnered only 3 percent of the shareholder vote. Such nuisance resolutions fly in the face of the facts: GMOs...
Raising The Minimum Wage Is The Right Thing To Do: Wherein Robert Reich Gets It All Wrong
Robert Reich seems to be a smart man. He served under three presidents, and now is Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. His video (below) says raising the minimum wage is the right thing to do. Unfortunately, he gets it all wrong. Donald Boudreaux of the Cato Institute notes a couple of errors in Reich’s thinking. First, Ignoring supply-and-demand analysis (which depicts the mon-sense understanding that the higher...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2026 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved