I threw this together because of a question that came up on Colorado Pols. A big question is – what is the relationship between spending and educational attainment. The raw data can be found at Download Ed spending and is pulled from http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/education/011747.html and http://www.census.gov/prod/2009pubs/p20-560.pdf
One note, both of the graduation rates are for residents at age 25. This probably skews high school a bit, but college quite a bit more. There's probably more college graduates leaving Idaho than entering it. And probably more entering Colorado than leaving it. The biggest skew is almost certainly Washington DC where 47.5% of the 25 year olds there have a college degree.
High School graduation rate vs. dollars. North Carolina is amazing with the second highest graduation rate and one of the lowest per pupil expenditures. But the giant message here is that the distribution, outside of New York (upper right point) is awfully close to random. The only conclusion is you have to spend over 6K/pupil to get better results. But spending over 6K/pupil has no relation to increased results.
Next is College graduation rate vs. dollars. These are even more clumped in a narrow range of percentage of graduates. This may well be due to graduates moving to where they are needed and the needs of all the states fall in the 15% - 35% band. As such, this graph may not be telling us anything about the job the K-12 schools did in that state.
Finally I came across this table showing K-12 spending increases in constant dollars. Because this is constant dollars any upward slope means in increasing percentage of our tax dollars is going to K-12. Where needed we do need to increase, but if this increases over time forever, that is not sustainable because it will eventually be greater than the entire state budget. This is what led to healthcare becoming this giant financial issue – compound interest will eventually destroy anything.
