Fixes to Kentucky’s school-level financial reports don’t fix much – Total Spending Still Strange

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.

In the first blog in the series, I pointed out that the overall amount of data available is highly inadequate. However, the revised data now being reported still looks questionable even though the gross errors for Paris and Hardin are fixed.

This blog explores the revised data sorted as was done with the original data for Table 3 in the Policy Note. This shows “Kentucky Public Schools with Highest and Lowest Total Per Student Spending from All Fund Sources, Sorted by Amount, from the "Sort on Total Spending" worksheet, 2018-19 School Year.”

Although the huge outliers for Paris Middle School and the Hardin County schools are now gone, there remain some pretty big disagreements in the total funding each school supposedly spent per pupil in the 2018-19 school year, as the table below shows. This table includes the top and bottom parts of the new “Sort on Total Spending” tab in the revised Excel spreadsheet.

Let’s look at some issues.

Topping the listing for our “Sort on Total Spending Tab” data in our revised Excel spreadsheet  is the Martin County High School, supposedly spending a rather large $41,003 per student in 2018-19.

Near the bottom of the listing find the Webster County High School supposedly only spending $7,377 per student.

Does it seem reasonable that Martin County High is spending over 5-1/2 times more than Webster County High? The answer is probably not, because as we will see in a future blog that will look at the “Sum of Individual Items v Total Tab” data, it is highly questionable that Martin County High is really spending this much.

Still, Newport High School is reported to be spending over 3-1/2 times what Webster County High spends. Can you really run a high school for only $7,377 per pupil? Is the spending difference between Webster County High and Newport High likely to result in inequitable education? You might think so, but in 2018-19 KPREP testing Webster County High’s report card data shows it scored 29.1% proficiency in math while Newport High only scored 15.3% proficiency (Report cards can be accessed here).

To be sure, there is a lot more poverty in Newport where 83.5% qualify for the federal school lunch program while in Webster County High 53.2% do, but the spending difference still needs a lot more discussion.

Consider another Webster County School District example that we discuss on Page 8 in the Policy Point. I’ll just quote from the Policy Point as nothing is changed in the revised spreadsheet.

At the very bottom of the “Sort on Total Spending” worksheet extract is Webster County’s Sebree Elementary School, which supposedly only spent $5,977 per pupil in total in 2018-19. If this is really true, parents, students and teachers should consider suing for a lack of equitable support given that the average per pupil total spending across Kentucky was over $14,000.

Also, near the bottom of the worksheet, listed just four rows above Sebree, is the Dixon Elementary School, also from Webster County. Dixon supposedly gets $7,427 per pupil, considerably more than Sebree.

But, consider this: according to data in each of these two schools’ listings in the Kentucky School Report Cards for 2018-19, Sebree has 75.4% eligibility for school lunches (a poverty measure) while Dixon’s eligibility rate is much lower at 43.5%. Also, other report card data indicate that 23.5% of Sebree’s students are students with disabilities while only 15.9% of Dixon’s students have similar challenges. Finally, Sebree is heavily populated with minority students as only 48.4% of the enrollment is composed of white students while 96.5% of the students in Dixon are white.

Based on those demographics, we would expect to see more money on a per pupil basis going to Sebree. However, Dixon gets much higher funding, instead. If the financial data in the Kentucky Department of Education’s Excel spreadsheet is correct, it could point to significant funding inequity in Webster County. However, before Sebree parents get excited, more research is called for first, because we are not confident that the very low Sebree numbers in the KDE’s school spending file are accurate.

One last note in the Policy Point also remains true of the new spreadsheet.

One final note: if we accept the KDE’s funding information, that would mean Crums Lane Elementary’s funding is over 4.7 times higher than Sebree’s. That huge difference doesn’t seem credible and could point to more equity issues – if the funding data is close to accurate.

The bottom line here is that problems obviously remain with the school level spending report from the KDE. We’ll expand on those problems in future blogs.