Strategic Data Project Convening 2019

ESSA is requiring districts to report school-level actual expenditures for the first time. What will journalists, public advocates, and researchers do with these numbers? What are the promises and perils of this new data set and what do careful analysts need to know?
Each state education agency is providing separate, often vague guidance on reporting actual expenditures to schools. Districts have considerable flexibility on how they define site-based expenditures. We will discuss how different, common accounting practices can lead to dramatically different administrative data on dollars spent per student at schools sites. This can result in biased comparisons for intra- and inter-district school expenditures. We will also discuss methods to reduce the impact of district policy and practice to improve the quality of comparisons.
Even with consistent, unbiased data it’s important to make valid, relevant comparisons. We will discuss how researchers model school-site expenditures to better understand factors that have been shown to contribute to school costs. This session will empower the SDP community to work with school-site expenditure data. Our community is generally addresses efficacy and looks at differential outcomes to understand equity.
This session will work on addressing resource equity and efficiency, two questions of critical interest to leaders and policy-makers.