National Center for Education Statistics, October 2001
This is a regular publication by the National Center for Education Statistics. It's 65 pages long and pretty dry but it contains interesting facts about the relatively small number of big districts that collectively educate 23% of all American public school children. Note, though, that it's only 23%. Analysts and policymakers tend to focus so single-mindedly on big-city schools that they often neglect those attended by the other three-quarters of U.S. kids. Many of the latter - e.g. schools in Dayton, Ohio - have their full measure of education woes. Moreover, the hundred largest districts include a number of relatively posh suburban school systems such as Palm Beach (Florida), Montgomery County (Maryland) and Fairfax County (Virginia). So it's not easy to generalize about them. Still, they yield up interesting data, as much about individual districts as about the group of them. For example, while the federal share of their budget averages 9.1 percent, it varies from as little as 2.3 percent in some suburban systems to 14.5% in New Orleans (and even higher in the special cases of Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia). More remarkably, the percentage of "other staff" (people who are NOT teachers, counselors, "instructional support," library or school/district administrators) in the employ of these school districts ranges from the single digits in Chicago to some two-fifths of the entire payroll in New York, Philadelphia and several Florida districts. (The Chicago figure is bizarrely low but several other districts are below 20%.) You won't find any policy conclusions here - just data. To get a copy - its report number is NCES 2001-346 and the author is Beth Aronstamm Young - you could write to U.S. Department of Education, ED Pubs, PO Box 1398, Jessup, MD 20794-1398; you could phone 1-877-4ED-Pubs; or you could surf to http://www.nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2001346.
