It’s not just a law; it’s actually found in Section 183 of the Kentucky Constitution!

Kentucky is supposed to have “an efficient system of common schools.”

However, it looks like that news isn’t getting out – not to legislators and not to state and lower-level school officials, either.

Click the “Read more” link for some examples of how state and local school leaders don’t seem interested in making efficient use of our tax dollars in their school systems.

First case in point: while Kentucky’s official school report cards’ databases provide data on per pupil spending for each school in the state, the published figures are sometimes dramatically untrustworthy.

For example, the “Data Sets” part of the Kentucky School Report Cards includes a file in the Learning Environment section titled Students-Teachers, which lists per pupil spending figures for each school. But, for the Betsy Layne High School in Floyd County, the figure listed is a ridiculously low $369 per pupil. That wouldn’t even come close to covering the teachers’ salaries let alone all the other expenses. If that isn’t ridiculous enough, the same file for 2014-15 lists per pupil spending in the Bremen Elementary School in Muhlenberg County as only $15 a head!

Both schools are listed as standard, Class A1 schools, by the way. They are not special schools, which might serve unique student groups that could have unusual expenses.

Clearly, no-one is paying attention to this important data. If it cannot even accurately determine how much each school is spending, how in the world can the state’s education leadership even begin to get much of an idea about whether or not their schools spend tax dollars wisely and – must I repeat it again – Efficiently?

In truth, it doesn’t look like the term "Efficient" much crosses the minds of people running the state’s schools. I can’t recall the word even being mentioned by state education leaders since former education commissioner John Draud left that office nearly a decade ago.

Second case in point: Efficiency certainly didn’t seem to be much on the minds of the Jefferson County Board of Education this week as they debated their next, $1.4 billion school budget.

But, consider this:

• The Jefferson County Public School District (JCPS) – despite complaints about all sorts of education challenges – does not even come close to having the highest student poverty rates in Kentucky (as gauged by their students’ combined eligibility rate for the federal free and reduced cost lunch program). Data from the 2014-15 Kentucky School Report Cards’ Learning Environment file shows the district’s combined school lunch rate was 65.1 percent, ranking at 79th place from the top among Kentucky’s 173 school districts.

• The district’s per pupil spending (district figures appear more reasonable than the school level figures) from the same file ranks in eighth place from the top. Jefferson County spent $12,739 per student in 2014-15 while the average spending across all the school districts was much lower at $10,403 per student.

• However, despite its middle-level poverty rates and well above average per pupil spending, Jefferson County’s performance on a variety of tests is cause for concern. In the 2014-15 testing of all the state’s 11th grade students with the ACT college entrance test, other files in the Kentucky School Report Cards “Data Sets” that cover assessments show Jefferson County’s overall average score of only 18.8 ranks rather low at 92nd place among the 168 districts that serve high school grades. When we look at eighth grade performance on the EXPLORE tests, also from ACT, Inc., the district ranks way down at 153rd place for 2014-15 among the 172 districts that had scores reported.

Never the less, the Courier-Journal’s May 24, 2016 coverage of the Jefferson County Board of Education’s deliberations over a proposed $1.4 billion budget for next year never even mentions “Efficiency.”

Instead, despite the fact that the district already spends at levels well above the state average rate, at one point John Collopy, JCPS' director of financial planning and management, said in the meeting that:

“as we move forward, we have to be cognizant of the fact that this budget is not all-inclusive. It doesn’t cover all of our needs.”

That’s not efficient. Maybe, it’s not even constitutional in Kentucky.

If Jefferson County really wanted to get more efficient, an obvious way to start would be to cut back on its excessive, and generally unproductive, school busing madness. As we pointed out recently in our “Blacks Continue Falling Through Gaps in Louisville’s Schools, The 2016 Update,” just moving huge numbers of students around town on boring bus rides doesn’t necessarily do anything good for their education. In fact, what it might do is contribute to Jefferson County’s horrendous levels of student misbehavior. That’s really not efficient – at least it’s not if your goal is better education.

In fact, maybe this isn’t really constitutional, either.