Financial Transparency February 9, 2017 By: Marguerite Roza Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University

Think of a school you know well. How much is spent per pupil for the students in that school? Estimates. Most places, hard to find out. Most principals don’t know. Sups don’t know. Funders, taxpayers, teachers don’t know. We do know performance by school. Why does it matter… if want all eyes on leveraging dollars to do the most for students, we need this info. Building State Capacity & Productivity Center bscpcenter.org

Building State Capacity & Productivity Center bscpcenter.org Estimates. Most places, hard to find out. Most principals don’t know. Sups don’t know. Funders, taxpayers, teachers don’t know. We do know performance by school. Why does it matter… if want all eyes on leveraging dollars to do the most for students, we need this info. Building State Capacity & Productivity Center bscpcenter.org

ESSA requires that SEAs report: What is the financial transparency requirement? ESSA requires that SEAs report: “The per-pupil expenditures of Federal, State, and local funds, including actual personnel expenditures and actual nonpersonnel expenditures of Federal, State, and local funds, disaggregated by source of funds, for each local educational agency and each school in the State for the preceding fiscal year.” Deadline = Dec. 2018 for 2017-18 school year. Building State Capacity & Productivity Center bscpcenter.org

Opportunity behind school-level spending data School as an important unit in the ed system. We already report outcomes by school. Now add expenditures. Explore what’s possible for students at each level of spending. Coupling spending and performance data by school can: Activate school-level engagement to leverage dollars to do the most for students. Explore resource tradeoffs. Foster the spread of innovations Financial data enables exploration of equity. With SEA-defined expenditure reports, these data can be presented in a way that enables communities to explore inequities in a local context. Building State Capacity & Productivity Center bscpcenter.org

Financial Transparency Working Group FTWG (‘FiTWiG”) Federally funded through BSCP Center at Edvance CCSSO funds expansion in scope and time Edunomics Lab leads the effort Biweekly meetings, one in-person meeting Goals: a) help SEAs be successful in meeting requirement b) go beyond compliance and embrace the opportunity in the data to drive system improvement Building State Capacity & Productivity Center bscpcenter.org

Example data: Meeting the basic requirement: Central District Valley District Charterama LEA Maple Elem Ceder Elem LEA average Green School River Acad. LEA Average Charterama school #1 A School level Federal $1,101 $432 $554 $301 $614 $401 B S/L $8,722 $7,759 $7,861 $5,493 $7,112 $6,626 $11,619 C Sch total $9,823 $8,191 $8,415 $5,794 $7,726 $7,027 $12,720 D LEA level $421 $589 $- E $4,597 $5,573   F Grand Total $14,841 $13,209 $13,433 $11,956 $13,888 $13,189 Building State Capacity & Productivity Center bscpcenter.org

… Financial data reporting can go beyond minimal requirements Building State Capacity & Productivity Center bscpcenter.org