Exploring the Quality of School-Level Expenditure Data: Practices and Lessons Learned in Nine Sites
Author: Atchison, Drew
Date: 2017-01-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Educational Quality,Expenditures,School Districts,Data Collection,Case Studies,Federal Aid,Federal Legislation,Educational Legislation,Elementary Secondary Education,Resource Allocation,Mixed Methods Research,Comparative Analysis,Interviews,Focus Groups,Funding Formulas,School Surveys,State Departments of Education,Accuracy,Costs,Educational Finance,Civil Rights,Training,Quality Assurance

Concerns about the equitable distribution of school funding within and across school districts have led to new federal data collections on school-level expenditures. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) required states to collect and report, for the first time, school-level data on both personnel and non-personnel expenditures from state and local sources for the 2008-09 school year. Subsequently, the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) added a similar data collection to its Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) beginning with the 2009-10 school year, and the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) is currently piloting a School-Level Finance Survey (SLFS) that would extend current NCES fiscal data collections to include some school-level variables. In addition, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), enacted in December 2015, amended Title I, Part A of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA) to require states and local educational agencies (LEAs) to report school-level per-pupil expenditures on state and LEA report cards. These data may be useful for helping policymakers, educators, and others understand the extent to which resources are distributed equitably among schools and may also enhance transparency and efficiency in the allocation of education resources. The experiences of the nine sites included in this study demonstrate that collecting and reporting high-quality school-level expenditure data is feasible and has perceived benefits for transparency, equity, and the efficient use of resources. Each of the study sites attributed a large majority of their operational expenditures to individual schools, and most of these expenditures were directly tracked to school sites rather than merely being allocated post hoc using formulas. A key challenge in the process of collecting and reporting school-level expenditure data--according to the panel of experts, is ensuring consistency in practices surrounding the attribution of dollars to schools both within and across districts and states. The states and districts in this study were most able to track personnel expenditures to the school level. Data on non-personnel expenditures were much less comprehensive and consistent. The findings also raise concerns about the accuracy of allocating expenditures to schools using formulas, rather than directly tracking expenditures to schools. In addition, differences across sites in the types and shares of expenditures attributed to schools, and the methods used to do so, indicate that reported school-level expenditure figures are not necessarily comparable across sites. Nevertheless, the experiences and data shared by these five states and four school districts may serve as examples for others wishing to develop or improve their own systems for collecting and reporting high-quality data on school-level expenditures.