Collection of Private School Finance Data: Development of a Questionnaire

Introduction

The (NCES) is responsible for collecting, analyzing, and disseminating data on a wide range of educational issues. One important example of data collection is the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS), which collects a rich assortment of data on the characteristics of both public and private elementary and secondary schools. This data set, however, contains little information regarding school finances. The Federal government collects information on expenditures by public school districts - through the National Public Education Finance Survey and the Annual Survey of Local Government Finances - Form 33, but there is no comparable national collection of expenditure data from private schools.

Current and accurate data are not available to inform education policy discussions regarding private schools, their contribution to education in the United States, and their use of resources - as compared with the use of resources in public schools. In short, data simply are not available to answer the following types of questions:

• How much does the United States spend in total on education (public and private)? How does total education spending this country compare with total education spending in other countries?
• How do per-pupil expenditures in private schools vary by type of school, grade level, region of the country, and school size? What proportion of per-pupil expenditures would be covered by a $3,000 voucher? How do per-pupil expenditures in private schools compare with per-pupil expenditures in public schools?
• How much of private school spending is for instruction? How much is for administration? Are resources allocated differently in private and public schools? Are private schools more efficient than public schools?
• If many types of private schools are cheaper than public schools, why is that so? How much of the cost of private schooling is borne by parents? By religious institutions? By fund-raising?

• How do per-pupil expenditures in My School compare with per-pupil expenditures in schools of a similar type, grade-level, size, or region? Does My School allocate a larger or smaller proportion of its budget to instruction than do similar schools?

Because of interest in collecting data to answer these questions, NCES contracted with the Pelavin Research Center and the John C. Flanagan Research Center of the American Institutes for Research for a series of tasks examining alternative strategies for collecting finance and resource data from private schools:

• In the first set of tasks, Pelavin Research Center explored, and ultimately rejected, the possibility of extrapolating national expenditures on private elementary and secondary education from data collected by three major associations of private schools;\1
• In a second set of tasks, the Pelavin Research Center worked closely with members of the private school community to develop and pilot test a questionnaire that would collect data on expenditures directly from a national sample of private schools;
• Third, the John Flanagan Research Center undertook a study of the possibility of collecting data for a resource model of school expenditures; and
• Finally, the Pelavin Research Center is using its work on developing a private school questionnaire as the basis for developing a corresponding questionnaire for collecting school-level expenditure data from public schools.\2

This report represents the culmination of the second of these tasks.

Appended to the report is a proposed Private School Finance Survey questionnaire that has already been field-tested in 17 schools, and is ready for a full-scale pilot test and possible inclusion as a follow-up questionnaire to the next Schools and Staffing Survey.

The first section of this report provides background information on the development of the questionnaire, as well as a discussion of issues related to survey administration. In the second section, the report sets forth the major findings of the two pilot tests conducted this spring. The third section contains a detailed discussion of the items in the final version of the questionnaire.

1/See Garet, M., Chan, T., Isaacs, J., and Sherman, J., The Determinants of Per-Pupil Expenditures in Private Elementary and Secondary Schools: An Exploratory Analysis, NCES Working Paper 97-07, March 1997; and Garet M., Chan, T., and Sherman, J. Estimates of Expenditures for Private K-12 Schools, NCES Working Paper 95-17, May 1995.

2/See Best, C., Cullen, A., Garet, M., Isaacs, J., and Sherman, J., Collection of Public School Finance Data: Development of a Questionnaire, Washington, DC: Pelavin Research Center, May 1997.