Skip to main content
Add as a preferred source on Google

The Condition of Education and the Education Marketplace

  • By Jerry Enderle
  • 07/01/18

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) has a mandate to report to Congress on the condition of education by June 1 of each year. Their recently released report, The Condition of Education 2018, gives us a look at the trends and developments in education using the latest available data. When looking at enrollment, public school enrollment has increased from 50.31 million in 2015 to 50.44 million in 2016. The number of students enrolled in public charter schools has increased from 2.7 million in 2014 to 2.8 million in 2015.

While the number of students continues to increase, the revenues stayed the same at about $664 billion. In the 2014-2015 school year, revenues for public schools looked like this: $56.4 billion from federal sources, $309 billion from state sources, $298.5 billion from local sources. Compared to the prior year, the federal contribution stayed about the same, while the state sources increased by $11 billion and the local funding increased by about $9 billion. During that same school year, total expenditures rose to $668 billion, or about $11,734 per student.

While it is nearly impossible to predict where education funding will end up in the next few years, indications are that this trend may continue, or, even more likely, schools will be forced to do more with less.

With this in mind, we present our annual Facilities Sourcebook, which is designed to serve as a year-round reference guide to facilities, security, technology and business services and products for the K-12 market. The businesses that are featured in this special section are advertisers that regularly support this magazine. Without them, we would not exist. We ask that you take that into consideration when you make future decisions about purchasing materials and services.

By the time you receive this issue, most of you will have begun a new school year. May it be a successful one!

A reminder, you can follow me on Twitter, @SPM_editor, and you are always welcome to contact me with your thoughts and ideas at [email protected].

This article originally appeared in the School Planning & Management July/August 2018 issue of Spaces4Learning.

Featured

  • Building Beyond Simulation: Creating Immersive Ecosystems for Healthcare Education

    Health sciences education is one of the fastest-growing facility types in colleges and universities. The demand for medical, nursing, and allied health professionals is driving the creation and renovation of medical simulation training facilities that provide students with real-world experience through advanced simulation-based learning.

  • How Proactive Maintenance Can Transform Athletic Facilities into Strategic Assets for College Sports

    College athletics is entering one of the most transformative periods in its history. With NIL reshaping financial models and competitive expectations, athletic departments across the country are being asked to do more than ever with increasingly constrained resources.

  • Rethinking K-12 Schools as a Continuous Learning Experience

    Most students move through three or more separate facilities during their K-12 journey, yet the built environments they encounter at each stage have traditionally been designed in isolation, with little continuity in spatial language, learning philosophy, or physical resources. Each new school is a reset with different layouts, learning models, expectations, and ways of moving through a building. The next generation of school design is making the case that the first day of kindergarten and the last day of high school can and should feel connected through common support systems and infrastructure in the physical environment.

  • Georgia State University Opens New Research Tower

    Georgia State University in Atlanta, Ga., recently held a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new, nine-story, 155,000-square-foot Research Tower, according to university news. Amenities include academic classrooms, a large lecture space, teaching labs, faculty research space, and the uppermost floors reserved for future expansion.