SchoolsRetooled TM

Data on Resource Allocation?

July 17, 2014 at 11:41 AM Leave a comment

Aggregate expenditures in the US on the “instruction” portion of education are approaching $0.5 TRILLION, and that’s only about 60% of total spending. So how do we spend it across the curriculum? Dunno…there’s no uniform chart of accounts to analyze that. And the folks we trust to manage resource allocation for education are the same people who don’t seem bothered by this…they just know they always need more money.

Financial charts of accounts are boring. Especially once you have gone through them state by state without finding any unifying principle. In fact, in most states you cannot find a standard across local districts. We have no idea how we as a nation allocate our instructional resources by grade, subject, or program area. Nor do we have the ability to compare variations in spending against student outcomes with any real specificity.

If Lunch Lady Doris spends $25 on a birthday cake…we’ve got her. Alert the superintendent…the press is on the way, inquiring minds want to know. Yet no one seems concerned about the details when we spend hundreds of billions of dollars on instruction and almost half our students fall below grade level proficiency in math and literacy. One line item, which comprises 60% of spending, is the full report on instruction.

Money matters. And we need to know where it goes. Food, transportation, and buildings consume significant resources, and spending that money judiciously is important. But we put way too much emphasis on prevention of impropriety in the latter categories than we do actively intending spending for education in a rational model for student learning.

The student should be at the center of the story – weighted funding based on intensity of educational needs – with matching of corresponding expenditures in a case management model. Is anybody listening?

Entry filed under: Data, Financial data.