Fixes to Kentucky’s school-level financial reports don’t fix much – State/Local dollars don't add up, either
Following the release several weeks ago of the Bluegrass Institute’s Policy Point on MISCALCULATING ACCOUNTABILITY, Kentucky’s School Financial Reports Just Don’t Add Up, the Kentucky Department of Education (KDE) issued a revised Excel spreadsheet with school level spending per student.
While it’s nice to have the obvious errors for Paris Middle School and several Hardin County schools finally fixed (the corrections took more than four months to appear from the time I originally notified the KDE about these problems), the unfortunate reality is that the vast majority of problems discussed in our Policy Point remain, as I explain in this series of “Fixes” blogs. This new blog series is built around a new BIPPS Excel spreadsheet created to analyze the revised data.
Our revised spreadsheet contains the updated data downloaded from the KDE along with additional tabs that show various analyses of that data done in same way used to create the Policy Point’s associated Excel spreadsheet.
This is the fourth blog in our series about the revised data. In today’s blog we look at a recalculation of the item discussed on Pages 11 and 12 in the Policy Point regarding the actual sums for each school of reported spending from combined state and local sources for Personnel and Non-Personnel items compared to the KDE’s spreadsheet’s listed total for all state/local spending.
An extract of that original Excel spreadsheet’s tab was posted in Table 5 in the Policy Note on Page 11. The table below is like that Table 5 and summarizes the top and bottom portions of our full revised Excel’s “State-Local Sum Checks” tab.
The big changes here are the absence at the top of the table of schools from Hardin County. Now, Rockcastle County High School shows the largest positive discrepancy between the sum of its state/local personnel spending plus the state/local non-personnel spending and the reported supposed total of all state and local spending. How can the reported total for state plus local spending per pupil in this school, just $1,092, be so low when the sum of the reported parts is $11,142?
At the other end of the table, we find Ludlow High School supposedly only spent $2,585 per pupil from state and local dollars on personnel costs and only $1,820 per pupil from state and local sources on non-personnel costs. But, overall, the school supposedly spent $19,245 per pupil in total from state and local sources. How can that be? What did the extra $14,840 get spent on?
In fact, our comments in the Policy Point about the bottom of the original spreadsheet’s “State-Local Sum Checks” tab remain fully valid for this new spreadsheet, too.
There are plenty of other examples in our “State-Local Sum Checks” tab in the full revised Excel spreadsheet where the sum of the parts is far different from the reported totals.
We’d really like to do some Bang for the Buck analysis of how our tax dollars are translating into education outcomes for students, but you just can’t trust financial stuff like this. Basically, as we said in the title of our Policy Point, even with the changes in the revised Excel spreadsheet from KDE, the school financial reports just don’t add up.
Summarizing earlier blogs in this series
The first blog in the series, points out that the overall amount of data available remains highly inadequate.
The second blog discusses the revised listing of total spending per pupil in each school.
The third blog shows how, in an error that would drive any accountant crazy, the reported total sum of federal spending in each school often does not equal the two reported federal spending components, personnel spending and non-personnel spending.
These earlier blogs show most of the concerns we mentioned in the Policy Point remain valid.