School-Level Spending Data Reveals Districts’ Role in Allocating Education Funds
April 23, 2020
A “sleeper provision” in ESSA “requiring states to publish annually on their report cards the per-student spending data for every public school in their borders” is “finally bearing fruit,” according to an article in Education Next. “As of March 2020, more than half of the nation’s states had released school-level spending data, with the remaining states expected to follow suit by the June deadline.” In some cases, the release of this information has raised questions as to why some districts are spending “thousands of dollars more per student on one of its schools than the others.” As Education Next found, “there is no single story across districts or even types of districts. The patterns vary from place to place.”