Introduction

The Common Core of Data (CCD) is an annual collection of public elementary and secondary education data by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) in the Institute of Education Sciences of the U.S. Department of Education. The U.S. Census Bureau conducts the data collection for the finance surveys on behalf of NCES. State education agencies (SEAs) report the finance data through an online data collection site. SEAs report student membership data through the U.S. Department of Education’s EDFacts data collection system. This report presents findings on public education revenues and expenditures using fiscal year 2009 (FY 09) data from the National Public Education Financial Survey (NPEFS) of the CCD survey system. Programs covered in the NPEFS include regular, special, and vocational education; charter schools (if they reported data to the SEA); and state-run education programs (such as special education centers or education programs for incarcerated youth).

The CCD NPEFS is a universe collection of public elementary and secondary education finance data reported annually by SEAs in each of the 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the four U.S. Island Areas of American Samoa, Guam, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The NPEFS provides SEA-level data for all revenues and expenditures associated with each reporting state or jurisdiction, including revenues by source and expenditures by function and object.

SEAs participate in the CCD voluntarily, following standard definitions for the data items they report. In some cases, SEAs may be unable to report a key data item at all or may be unable to report a key data item in exact accordance with a CCD definition. When this happens, NCES imputes or edits values for these items. Please see Appendix A: Methodology and Technical Notes in this report for a detailed discussion of imputations and edits.

While the tables in this report include data for all NPEFS respondents, the discussion in the text is limited to the 50 states and the District of Columbia. Data for all 10 of the current expenditure functions collected on NPEFS are presented in tables 2, 3, and 4. These 10 functions are combined to produce the four categories displayed in tables 7 and 8.

Please see appendix A for more information about survey content and methodology. Appendix B is a glossary of key terms used in this report.

More information about CCD surveys and products is available at http://nces.ed.gov/ccd.

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