An example of this is an Arizona school district that could see as much as a 36-percent boost in achievement if it increased its efficiency from the lowest level to the highest, all else being equal, the report said.
Another finding is that without controls on how additional school dollars are spent, more education spending will not automatically improve student outcomes.
To illustrate this point, the report cites the Wisconsin school systems of Oshkosh and Eau Claire: the districts are about the same size and serve similar student populations. They also get largely similar results on state exams; however, Eau Claire spends an extra $8 million to run its school system.
Another example is California, which earmarked more than $41 million in 2009 to hire additional gym teachers to combat childhood obesity. “This, despite there being no shortage of gym instructors in the state, or any evidence that increasing the number of gym teachers reduces obesity. Worse,” says the report, “the grants are not even targeted at schools with large percentages of overweight students.”
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“In more than half of the states included in our study, there was no clear relationship between spending and achievement after adjusting for other variables, such as cost of living and students in poverty,” said Boser.
Other findings include:
• Low educational productivity reportedly costs the nation’s school systems as much as $175 billion a year.
• More than a million students are enrolled in what the report calls “highly inefficient” districts.
• High-spending school systems are often inefficient.
• Students from disadvantaged backgrounds are more likely to be enrolled in highly inefficient districts.
• The nation’s least-productive districts, as defined by the report, spend more on administration.
• States and districts fail to evaluate the educational productivity of their districts and schools.
• The quality of state and local education data is often poor.
• Educational productivity varies widely within states.
• Some urban districts are far more productive than others.
• “Highly productive” districts are focused on improving student outcomes.
So far, only two states—Florida and Texas—provide data to their districts on how well they use education spending, says Boser.
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