Last month, after 10 educators were arrested at the state Capitol while protesting for more state money for education, Gov. Ned Lamont was asked his response to the idea that Connecticut was under-funding its schools.
"Well, we are a state that does spend more per pupil than any other state in the country," he said, later adding that "sometimes the answer isn't just more money."
While Lamont was right that Connecticut ranks among the states with the highest levels of education spending, his details were off. Connecticut actually stands fourth nationally in per-pupil spending. (A Lamont spokesperson said Friday the governor may have been referring to past years' figures and should have said Connecticut ranked "among the highest" in per-pupil spending.)
Furthermore, most of that spending does not derive from the state itself but from municipal budgets. As of 2020-21, the most recent year for which data is available, only 36% of education funding in Connecticut came from the state level, sixth least of any state, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
That means local school districts are largely funded locally, whether they're wealthy suburbs or poor cities. This, experts say, helps explain why Connecticut has such wide disparities in test scores and other measures of achievement from one district to the next.
According to the latest data, Connecticut schools spend about $25,000 annually per student, behind only New York, Vermont and New Jersey among all states. That total is more than twice that of the bottom states on the list, most of which are in the South.
The more you dig into the data, though, the less impressive that figure becomes. Michael Morton, from the non-profit School + State Finance Project, argues that per-pupil numbers generally overstate Connecticut's investment in education, since they don't account for cost-of-living, which is higher in the Northeast than in the South.
"The cost of living is drastically different," Morton said. "Whenever we look at from a statewide perspective, it tends to get skewed."