Fixes to Kentucky’s school-level financial reports don’t fix much – Data still limited

Following the recent release of the Bluegrass Institute’s Policy Point on MISCALCULATING ACCOUNTABILITY, Kentucky’s School Financial Reports Just Don’t Add Up several weeks ago, the Kentucky Department of Education (KDE) issued a revised Excel spreadsheet with school level spending per student. While it was nice to have the obviously grossly in error data for Paris Middle School and several Hardin County schools fixed, the unfortunate reality is that vast majority of problems uncovered in our report remain.

I have now analyzed the revised Excel spreadsheet, and in this and following blogs I will point out serious credibility problems that still remain.

Where’s the Data?

Pages 4 and 5 in our Policy Point discuss the extremely limited amount of data the Excel spreadsheet offers for each school. That problem remains.

There still are only two types of spending listed, Personnel Spending per Student and Non-Personnel Spending Per Student. No further breakdown is offered. We don’t even get a separate breakout of the spending on teachers’ salaries versus the spending on salaries for other school staff such as Principals, curriculum specialists, librarians, cafeteria workers, custodians, and so forth. The only other spending item, Non-Personnel spending, seems to include a huge number of items that might range from utility costs to plant updates and so forth.

Furthermore, the sources of funding are limited to one for federal funding and an unnecessarily limited combined total for state and local funding. Why are state and local dollars being combined?

As we noted in our Policy Point, this isn’t the way the district-level financial reports are organized. The breakout in that document, as shown in Table 2 in our report (shown below) includes a number of spending items that could also be examined at the school level.

But, you just cannot do much with the limited data in the current Excel spreadsheets. For example, you cannot see the split between the state and local funding that actually reaches each school. With local school folks yelling they need more money, that might be nice data to look at.

So, to close out today’s school finance reporting problems blog, the small changes to the revised Excel spreadsheet don’t do anything to fix the problems we identify on Pages 4 and 5 in our report.