More on real examples of how school choice really impacts public schools

Several days ago, I blogged about “If we’re talking about impacts of school choice, let’s look at real examples, not guesses.” The impetus for that blog was a lot of fussing and guessing going on about how improving school choice options in Kentucky would supposedly adversely impact public schools in the state and how the doomers and gloomers just aren’t getting this right. They assuming more money is everything in education.

As the earlier blog shows, that just isn’t so. In that blog I used a comparison of the public education performance in high-school-choice Florida to the public schools’ performance in Kentucky over time. There wasn’t much of a contest. Despite having much higher minority populations and actually spending notably less per pupil than Kentucky does, Florida none the less outperformed the Bluegrass State for improvement in both math and reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

But, there is more to the story.

After I finished assembling the evidence for that first blog, I realized I had the data to create something else, a “Bang for the Buck” comparison of how efficiently each state has used its education spending. I expected Florida to look better than Kentucky, but I was shocked to discover that Florida actually improved its education per dollar performance on NAEP while Kentucky’s education per dollar performance has decayed in both math and reading.

Table 1 summarizes those Bang for the Buck numbers.

Table 1

Consider the reading section of the table (shaded in yellow) first.

In 1992 Florida scored 20.4 NAEP Scale Score Points for each $1,000 it spent on each pupil. In that year Kentucky was actually a lot more efficient than Florida, achieving 25.6 NAEP Scale Score Points for each $1,000 of per pupil revenue.

But, that good news about Kentucky didn’t last.

Using the latest available federal data on Per Pupil revenue in each state, which actually is for the 2017-18 school term, the NAEP score per dollar performance in Florida actually improved slightly to 21.0 points per $1,000 of per pupil revenue while Kentucky’s seriously decayed to only 17.8 NAEP Scale Score Points per $1,000 of per pupil revenue.

Simply put, Kentucky’s educational efficiency suffered a serious decline while Florida posted a slight improvement that puts Florida ahead of Kentucky for bang for the buck as of 2019. I had expected Florida, like Kentucky, to show some, but not as much, loss of education efficiency. In fact, Florida moved in the other direction.

Looking at math (area shaded in green in the table), the exact same sorts of shifts occurred, but with Florida showing an even more surprising better improvement in bang for the buck for math compared to its small improvement for reading.

Overall, it’s clear that a big increase in school choice in Florida is associated with a notable increase not only in public school academic performance but also with much better employment of education dollars by those public schools, as well.

School choice poor Kentucky shows the opposite trend in efficiency and notably less academic improvement in consequence.

So, the bottom line here is that just spending more on education doesn’t mean you get what you should – better education for students. Despite what those doomers and gloomers would have us believe, it’s better education for students, not just measuring dollars spent, that we really need to value. And, it looks like choice has spurred some surprising and exciting things in Florida’s public schools, too.

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For those who like to dig into the data, the following expanded tables provide all the information I had to assemble and analyze to create Table 1 above.

Table 2

I could not locate an online edition of Public Education Finances: 1992, which is part of a US Census Bureau series on education finances in all 50 states. So, I had to use 1992 total revenue and Fall 1991 enrollment data from the 1994 edition of the Digest of Education Statistics to calculate the 1992 per pupil revenue amounts. The input data and resulting calculated Total Per Pupil Revenue for 1991-92 are shown in Columns 1 to 3 in the table.

I adjusted those initial 1992 per pupil revenue figures for inflation using the very neat Bureau of Labor Statistics’ CPI Inflation Calculator. The CPI calculator changed the 1992 figures into equivalent June 2018 dollars and the results are shown in Column 4.

The 2018 per pupil revenue figures in Column 5 come directly from a US Census Bureau Excel spreadsheet. The tables in this spreadsheet appear to match the earlier Public Education Finances series formats. These new Excel spreadsheets seem to have replaced the earlier, PDF version Public Education Finances series as I have not seen a Public Education Finances document released for several years.

I had to use Fiscal Year 2018 data (2017-18 school year) as the 2019 numbers are not yet available.

Notice when you compare the inflation-adjusted revenue in Column 4 to the 2018 revenue figures in Column 5 that Kentucky moved from spending notably less than Florida to notably more. But, as pointed out in the initial discussion with Table 1, Kentucky’s increase was not spent nearly as efficiently as Florida’s, and, ad I showed in the earlier blog, that allowed Florida to move ahead of the Bluegrass State.

Column 6 shows how much real funding has grown in Florida and Kentucky since 1992. Clearly, Kentucky’s revenue has increased much more than Florida’s.

Columns 7 and 8 show the NAEP Grade 4 Reading Scale Scores for 1992 and 2019 which were extracted from the NAEP Data Explorer.

Finally, Columns 9 and 10 show the scale score points per $1,000 of per pupil revenue in both states for 1992 and the 2019 NAEP. You can see in these columns that Florida moved from behind to ahead of Kentucky on NAEP reading.

Table 3 provides the same information for the math results.

 Table 3

So, to reiterate, just spending more on education doesn’t mean you get what you should – better education for students. It’s better education for students, not just measuring dollars spent, that is what we really need to pay attention to. And, Florida’s example indicates that school choice offers a strong way to get that improvement and more efficient use of dollars, too.