| In the past 30 years public school finance progressed through many phases, the inquiry and analysis of state funding for education became a political reality at the local and state levels, and became a national focus.;Public school finance has been analyzed on equity, adequacy, productivity, and accountability measures. The question has become: What are we getting for our investment in public education? As state courts overturned educational funding formulas, the discussion focus on: What is an adequate education and what is the expenditure to produce that education?;Policy analysis moved to the school level when variance in spending within states and districts proved to be very wide. It became understood that school-level information on educational expenditures would meet the needs for understanding school finance issues. However, student-level expenditure data further demonstrated that the actual dollars spent for each student in an educational setting varied significantly.;This study added to the most recent research on the actual expenditure per individual student at a public school. The school studied was an elementary school, housing grades K–5, in a suburban school district in California. This study was part of a group of parallel studies that enhanced the data available on expenditures per student in K–12 public education in California.;The first key finding in this study was that variance existed in classroom expenditure per student. The variance in classroom expenditure was determined to be attributed to teacher salary and the number of students in a classroom. The expenditure for supplemental programs was another key factor, reflecting the expenditure for the salary of the teacher or staff member delivering the supplemental program. The findings concerned with the expenditure per student of the school's external expenditures and the district's external expenditures were dismissed. The expenditure of external funds in this study was determined to be distributed equitably among all students in the school. The most significant variable was variance in teacher salary and class size as these factors directly impacted classroom expenditure per student. |
