In 2015, the Obama administration passed the Every Student Succeeds Act, which requires states to publish data on their per-student spending and their sources of income. But few were prepared to factor in the impact of a global pandemic on students learning, and how it would affect the way schools use resources. That’s where researcher Ash Dhammani and the Georgetown University Edunomics Lab can help. Dhammani advised NPF fellows on how to use the Lab’s National Education Resource Database on Schools (NERD$) – which contains spending data for every public school in America – to tell the story of educational progress—or decline. [Transcript | Video]
5 takeaways:
➀ Spending per student varies by state and by school district. “Something that is extremely surprising about this data is the range is very, very, very wide,” Dhammani said. Utah is one of the most frugal states in education spending. Its Alpine district spent $6,646 per student. In contrast, White Plains, New York spent $28,632 per student. Other schools can spend close to six figures per student—for intriguing reasons. Said Dhammani, “I always love to give an example of Alaska where there’s an island school that I got to learn about, where they’re actually taking their kids on a plane to go to another island to attend a school. That costs a lot of money, people.”
➁ Schools receive their funding from a mix of federal, state and local sources. Local sources of school funding depend on how much a school district needs taxpayer funding. “Not everybody’s completely reliant on local taxes,” Dhammani said. Lower-wealth districts often rely more on state funds than on local funds. And federal funding is not as significant as many people think, making up only eight to 10 percent of school funding on average. Dhammani said public schools received a “massive influx of money “ because of the pandemic. The national average for school spending is between $12,000 to $14,000, and close to $3,000 to $4,000 extra funding per student came in during the pandemic.
➂ Just because a school spends more per student does not necessarily mean it is more successful than other schools. Dhammani said the Edunomics Lab provides data on the relationship between spending per student and standardized test scores in reading and math. “If you were to take a midpoint in elementary school, middle school and high school, what sort of performance are we seeing?” he said. Dhammani said some schools were unable to perform better than their peers even while receiving less money, but that doesn’t mean schools couldn’t effectively use more funding. “What is it that we can learn from this particular school?” he asked. “What is it that they’re doing as opposed to their peers that is working for them?” He said demographic differences between schools often mean schools have different needs.
➃ Learning loss from the pandemic could reduce students’ lifetime earnings by as much as $70,000, Dhammani said. These losses have wide-reaching effects. “Not only will individuals in the COVID cohort of students suffer long-term income losses, but also the individual states will see shrunken economic activity,” he said. Dhammani said the Edunomics Lab created a model to show how much learning loss each school district experienced over the pandemic. “We only did this for math and reading because that is the best level of data that’s out there available for at least all 50 states plus D.C.,” he said. Dhammani said research indicates tutoring, even at a four-to-one ratio, can help students catch up on lost time. Dhammani reminded journalists to consider using per-student spending in their stories. “It really gets that buy-in,” he said. “Do not overvalue federal investment. This one-time investment is not going to last.”
➄ Context Matters. Dhammani said school districts must do some serious soul-searching. “Is it a problem of them not getting enough money or is it a problem of them not putting their money towards the right things? They’re two very different things” Policy analysts often hear from stakeholders who are asking, “Oh well, if we got more money, we would’ve done better.” But Dhammani reminds them to consider that in many cases, they’re getting a lot more money compared to their peers. “Again, it’s not name calling or telling them what’s wrong, but really trying to get to the bottom of things and trying to understand, okay, how do we come up with a solution together?”
This program was sponsored by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the Heising-Simons Foundation. NPF is solely responsible for the content.
