Fiscal 2005 New York State public school finance data from the Fiscal Analysis and Research Unit of the New York State Department of Education is here. I’ve done some calculations that are of particular interest to me, and attached the modified spreadsheet to this post. The calculations, and the findings, are below.
First I’ve added up the school districts in the Downstate Suburbs (Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester, Rockland, and Putnam) and in Upstate New York for quick comparison with New York City.
Second, I’ve used 2004 Local Area Personal Income data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis to compare average private sector earnings in Downstate New York (excluding the high-paid Finance and Insurance sector) with the national average for private earnings. I found that those in Downstate New York earned 27.7% more than the national average that year (in past years that figure has typically been at or over 33%).
Given that average wages generally correlate with the cost of living, not to mention what non-educational workers can afford to pay for schools, I used that figure to adjust Downstate school spending downward, producing an “adjusted” average expenditure per student. Including Finance, those in Downstate New York earned 53.1% more than the national average; if you disagree with not using that figure as the adjustment factor, we’ll argue in the comments. Upstate private earnings per employee were 15.1% below the U.S average, making the public schools a desirable employment option there indeed.
Third, I calculated the total state aid per student, a field that is missing from the NYSED spreadsheet.
Finally, I compared New York City’s share of state education funding with its residents’ share of state income tax payments in 2003, the latest year available, when the city’s economy was depressed in the wake of 9/11.
My findings for FY 2005 are as follows.
The “reverse Robin Hood” total, the dollar value of educational resources the state redistributes away from New York City, which has the state’s largest concentration of poor and troubled children, seems to have gone up. Despite the economic downturn, city residents accounted for 39.4% of state income tax liability in 2003, or 40.2% if only taxable returns are included (ie. excluding the effect of the earned income tax credit). Once again, however, despite having 36.6% of the state’s public school students and students who were needier than average, the city only accounted for just 35.4% of state school funding, including 37.4% of “school aid” and 25.6% of STAR.
The reverse Robin Hood amount has typically been around $500 million lately, but with the total amount of state school funding going up and the city continuing to get a low share, the amount of money it is losing is rising. If all state school funding were eliminated, and the 39.4% of state income tax liability city residents paid had merely remained at home, the city would have been about $740 million better off. Not as much as in Pataki’s “best” year for sticking it to the city’s kids, or in the 1970s when the city was really reeling, but higher than it has been recently.
That figure is likely much higher this year. With the city’s economy recovered from the recession, its share of state income tax payments is probably much higher than 39.4%. Indeed, NYSED calculated in 2005 that the city’s “combined wealth ratio” was slighty over 100, meaning that balancing the wealth of Manhattan with the poverty of some parts of the other boroughs, New York Ciiy was about as wealthy as the rest of the state on average in 2005. In 2003, the city accounted for 42.3% of the state’s population.
In FY 2005, total state revenue per student was $6,357 in New York City and $7,394 in Upstate New York, consistent with long run differences. Thanks to a cut to New York City’s school aid combined with an increase for the rest of the state in the mid-1990s, combined with the growth of a STAR program that primarily benefited the affluent Downstate Suburbs, it appeared for a while that those suburbs, collectively, would eventually receive more state aid than New York City. After almost surpassing the city a few years ago, however, the suburbs fell behind in FY 2005, receiving on average $5,558 per student in state funding, or 12.6% less than New York City. The gap between New York City and Upstate, on the other hand, has grown wider, with the city falling farther behind.
New York City averaged $15,025 in expenditures per pupil in FY, just under the statewide average of $15,035. With the city’s expenditures adjusted downward for the cost of living as described above, however, the adjusted figure is $11,738 per student. It is worth mentioning that my adjustment, though I believe it is the correct one, is probably less than just about anybody else’s. You get it by dividing 1/1.277, making a dollar spent downstate worth just 78.1 cents compared with the nation or Upstate. Up in low-cost Upstate New York, the average expenditure per pupil was $13,512.
In the Downstate Suburbs, the average was $17,552, but adjusted for the cost of living downstate it was $13,712, or about the same as Upstate. Rough parity between Upstate and the Suburbs in toto, both far above New York City, has been the pattern for sometime when the cost of living adjustment I use is applied.
However, whereas in the past virtually no school districts had lower adjusted expenditures per student than New York City, in FY 2005 school districts with 8.3% of the state’s students, a total of 237,677, spent less. Many high needs districts, however, are spending far more per student than NYC (with cost adjustment), including Roosevelt on Long Island which was down at the bottom in past years.
With the city’s public school spending up from what I was, I’ve become interested in a national comparison. Census Bureau public school finance data for FY 2005 won’t be out until March 2007, based on the release of FY 2004 data in March 2006. But I’ve done some quick comparisons with the FY 2004 data, and will write about it later this week.