How Schools Allocate and Use Their Resources By Lawrence O. Picus School finance has traditionally concentrated on the distribution of resources to school districts, focusing primarily on the equitable distribution of funds within a state. This Digest summarizes data on expenditures and staffing patterns in the nation's schools, weighs the impact of financial resources on students' educational outcomes, and discusses the implications of these allocation patterns for future policy at both the state and local level. All fifty states collect fiscal information from school districts on revenues and expenditures and on district employees. The revenue data generally contain information about the sources and amounts of revenue received by each school district. Expenditure data are most frequently collected by object of expenditure, divided into categories such as professional salaries, classified salaries, employee benefits, materials and supplies, and capital expenditures.
Some states maintain databases with information on instructional aides.
In addition, the proportion spent on instruction remained about 61 percent from about 1950 onward. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, NCES inaugurated a project to collect more detailed and consistent expenditure data that would be available for cross-state comparisons. During this process they made some changes to the categories of data collected. During the 1990s, these data show that instructional expenditures continued to compose about 61 percent of the operating budget, rising slightly from 60.5 percent in 1991 to 61.7 percent in 1995. The single biggest expenditure in school districts is for personnel.