Over 44.1 million enrolled students were supervised by 3.3 million teachers, principals and other instructional staff. Public education is obviously a large-scale government enterprise that requires an equally large commitment of resources. The most common statistic in reference to school finance is per-pupil spending. There are many different ways to express per-pupil spending and, unfortunately, commentators often fail to emphasize these subtle distinctions. Generally, the money factor used for computation is either current expenditures or total expenditures.
Total expenditures are current expenditures plus capital outlay and interest on school debt.
The simplest way to express this distinction is to say that ADA tells us how many students attended school on an average day, while enrollment tells us how many should have attended. So we have four different ways of figuring per-pupil spending for any specific year. Each table in this report specifies which formulation it is using, but use caution when comparing per-pupil spending figures from one table to those of another. We generally see per-pupil spending statistics set out in a ranking of states, so that Connecticut's spending can be compared to New York's. However, per-pupil spending may vary widely within a state, with neighboring districts spending significantly different amounts of money per pupil.