Category: News and Opinion

The U.S. Census Bureau has released its education finance data for FY 2009. I'm compiling it as I have the time, and will write about it when I'm done. But this year, no one should have to wait for, or rely on, me. As they said they would do when I attended a symposium a year or two ago, the Bureau’s Governments Division is releasing more “derived data,” that is data that has been tabulated to be more comparable. For example, its current report features extensive revenue and expenditure data per $1,000 of local residents’ personal income and per student, with data per student by category. In fact, spending per student by category is available not only for states, but also for individual school districts with more than 10,000 students. Including, of course, the City of New York.

I’ve seen two MSM discussions of this data. The New York Times did not see fit to write about how much is spent in its own home city and state, but did write that nationally school spending wasn’t going up as much. And WNYC mentioned total per capita spending for the U.S., NYC and New York State, but not spending by category. But the MSM could look at that PDF report and write a comparison of spending by category right now. Yet it hasn’t. Instead, the dishonest, self serving propaganda about the proposed NYC budget by various self-interested groups has been duly reported on, on a “he said she said” basis. Is there something is that data that no one wants to talk about? Or is the problem that the Census Bureau doesn’t have a staff of flacks writing press releases that, combined with a quote in opposition from one of the usual suspects, constitutes a story? The actual NYC story is laid out below.