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

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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 for school year.
Building State Capacity & Productivity Center
bscpcenter.org

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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

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