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Frank JohnsonThe "School District Finance Survey (F-33)" is an annual local education agency-level collection of revenue and expenditure data for public education in grades prekindergarten, kindergarten, 1 through 12, and ungraded. It is part of the Common Core of Data (CCD) collection of surveys of administrative records data relating to public elementary and secondary education. This survey is also part of the U.S. Census Bureau's: "Annual Survey of Local Government Finances: School Systems" also known as the "F-33" survey. The Census Bureau acts as the collection agent for the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) for this survey.
Local education agencies (LEAs) send revenue and expenditure data to their state education agency, which may review and edit the data before sending them on to the Census Bureau. NCES and the Census Bureau review and edit the data before they are published. These edits include the addition of NCES district identification codes and nonfiscal variables, as well as the resolution of inconsistent or unusual data in collaboration with state data coordinators. Every state and the District of Columbia reported data on all school districts with financial activity.
Median expenditure per student data, and data for the school district at the 5th and 95th percentiles are shown in table 4. These percentile points were chosen to exclude any outlier data.
The federal range ratio is used in this report as an indicator of the difference between districts with relatively high revenues (or expenditures) per student and districts with relatively low revenues (or expenditures) per student. As used by Berne and Stiefel (1984) and in previous NCES publications (Parish, Matsumoto, and Fowler 1995; Hussar and Sonnenberg 2000), the federal range ratio excludes the top and bottom 5 percent of districts in order to reduce the influence of extreme cases. It is the difference between the amount per student of the district at the 95th percentile and the district at the 5th percentile, divided by the amount for the district at the 5th percentile.
There are many different types of LEAs. In addition to the types discussed earlier, there are districts whose only function is to collect and allocate funds, or to provide certain administrative services for a group of LEAs. Only regular education districts with student counts greater than zero were considered in the analyses resulting in table 4.
In order to have comparable LEAs for analysis, those districts that did not have schools reporting students, or that were not recognized in the CCD "Local Education Agency Universe Survey," were removed from consideration in table 4. School districts whose primary function was providing special education or vocational education services were also removed from consideration in table 4. Charter schools that are not affiliated with a school district were treated separately from regular districts. Furthermore, districts with current expenditures per student less than $2,500 or greater than $35,000 (32 districts, or 0.21 percent of all regular districts) were removed from table 4, because they are outliers representing extraordinary school districts. Thus, regular school districts with students, school districts with current expenditures per student greater than $2,500 and less than $35,000, and school districts that have at least one non-charter school were included in the national and state analyses in table 4.
Independent charter schools are not affiliated with school districts. Data for these schools were reported separately at the bottom of table 4. To be included, these schools must have been in the CCD Local Education Agency Universe, have students, and report revenues and expenditures greater than zero. Some education agencies may be providing services to students who are counted in another agency. For some charter schools, only revenue data were reported.
For more information on the School District Finance Survey: School Year 2003-04, sdf041a data file, please see the file documentation at http://nces.ed.gov/ccd/f33agency.asp.
