Mattresses Full of Cash – Tennessee Education Report

Mattresses Full of Cash – Tennessee Education Report

MATTRESSES FULL OF CASH

On the heels of the Department of Revenue’s announcement today that the state has once again exceeded monthly revenue projections, the Tennessee Education Association (TEA) released a statement accusing Gov. Bill Lee of stuffing mattresses full of cash rather than spending money on K-12 education.

Here’s the statement from TEA:

“Today’s announcement on state revenues from the Department of Finance and Administration further validates TEA’s criticism of Gov. Bill Lee’s budget amendment released earlier this week. 

The state has racked up $1.42 billion in surplus year-to-date. The money is there to make a significant increase to K-12 funding. Gov. Lee is choosing to stuff mattresses full of cash instead of investing in Tennessee students. 

We can and must do better by our students, educators and public schools. It’s time for state leaders to choose to get Tennessee out of the bottom five for state investment per student.”

TEA’s statement comes in the same week Lee released a budget amendment with little new money for public schools. Earlier in the week, the Tennessee Public Education Coalition (TPEC) called on Lee to improve his budget amendment by directing more CONTINUE READING: Mattresses Full of Cash – Tennessee Education Report

The Adequacy of School District Spending in the U.S. – School Finance 101

The Adequacy of School District Spending in the U.S. – School Finance 101

The Adequacy of School District Spending in the U.S.

New Project at School Finance Indicators Database

With Matt Di Carlo & Mark Weber

Full research brief

Press release

Dataset

Data visualization

It’s fairly common knowledge that U.S. school districts vary widely in terms of funding. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, in an ideal school funding system, we would expect to see differences between districts in their spending levels, even big differences, for the simple reason that the cost of educating students varies a great deal across districts. 

For instance, some districts serve larger shares of high-need students than others, and the former require more resources to achieve a given level of student performance. Similarly, like any employer, districts have to pay competitive wages, and labor costs also vary substantially by location. Teachers in areas with high costs of living, for example, have to be paid more than their colleagues in small rural towns where living is less expensive. 

In short, unequal spending is acceptable and even desirable if it is aligned with unequal costs. The key question is whether districts have the resources to meet their students’ needs. In other words, is school district spending adequate?

This research brief presents key findings from a new public database of funding adequacy for over 12,000 U.S. public school districts. The database (the District Cost Database) allows one to compare each district’s actual per-pupil spending with estimates of adequate per-pupil spending levels—that is, spending levels that would be required to achieve the goal of U.S. average test scores (a common “benchmark” with which the models assess adequacy). The data are for the 2017-18 school year.

The brief reports some good news. Thousands of districts enjoy funding levels above and beyond estimated adequate levels. You can find these districts in every single U.S. state. In some cases, funding is two or three times higher than the targets. Even in states such as Arizona and New Mexico, where large majorities of students attend schools in underfunded districts, there are numerous districts in which spending exceeds estimated requirements.

Yet these districts co-exist with thousands of other school systems, some located within driving distance or even in the next town over, where investment is so poorly aligned with need that funding levels are a fraction of estimated costs. Districts with negative funding gaps are CONTINUE READING: The Adequacy of School District Spending in the U.S. – School Finance 101

Bruce D. Baker and Robert Cotto Jr.: The underfunding of Latinx-serving school districts - kappanonline org

The underfunding of Latinx-serving school districts  - kappanonline.org

The underfunding of Latinx-serving school districts 

An analysis of spending in U.S. public schools reveals dozens of districts — many with large Latinx enrollments — that are underfunded compared to other districts in their region, even though they serve children with much greater needs.  

When analyzing questions of fairness in local education spending, it’s important to understand that the value of the education dollar is relative. It doesn’t just matter how much money, in total, a school district spends but also how that figure compares to spending in nearby districts. After all, schools in the same area must compete with each other for employees. The district that spends $15,000 per pupil will have a harder time hiring and retaining the area’s highest-quality teachers and staff than will the neighboring district that spends $20,000. Moreover, each dollar will go further in districts that serve relatively affluent students than in those that serve large numbers of students from low-income backgrounds, who tend to need more (and more expensive) services. 

Several years ago, one of us (Bruce Baker) set out to identify public school districts that face this kind of competitive disadvantage — more specifically, districts where the students face greater needs than in surrounding districts (i.e., child poverty is more than 20% higher) but where per-pupil spending is less than 90% of the region’s average.  

At the time, a number of national reports had just been published comparing the overall fairness of states’ school finance systems (Baker & Corcoran, 2012; Baker, Sciarra, & Farrie, 2014). But studies were also beginning to show a lot of variation within states. Even in those states that appeared to have relatively well-funded and equitable school finance systems, some districts were being left out. And that raised the question: Did those districts have something in common?  

The answer turned out to be yes. Those districts where students’ needs were greater but the schools were relatively under-resourced were disproportionately located in smaller cities that served high CONTINUE READING:  The underfunding of Latinx-serving school districts  - kappanonline.org