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Alabama school funding is most helpful for schools where students already perform well on test scores.
A look at test results and spending in Alabama schools found that more local money has the biggest impact on achievement in schools with wealthier students. In other schools, money is important, but it’s hard to definitively connect increased spending with higher achievement.
AL.com, with support from Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab, wanted to see what kind of impact funding – in particular local funding – made on student test scores in Alabama. Previous studies have used district-level data, which masks differences in spending among schools in the district.
Using spending figures broken down by school, The Alabama Education Lab looked at the relationship between school spending and test scores for the 2018-19 school year, before the pandemic hit.
See maps and interactive graphics here.
After using statistical tools to examine the relationship between local spending and test scores in reading and math statewide, our school-level analyses showed the total amount of money spent in Alabama’s had a negative relationship with achievement. In other words, the more money that was spent, the lower test scores were.
But the relationship changed to a positive one – where more spending did correlate with higher test scores – for schools where fewer than 20% of students were in poverty.
That could simply be a reflection of the well-documented relationship between poverty and test scores. The majority of Alabama’s 1,315 schools–805 during the 2018-19 school year–have more than half of their student body in poverty.
And while poverty doesn’t always mean low achievement, poverty does present challenges that wealthier students don’t encounter.
School-level spending, required under the federal Every Student Succeeds Act, also doesn’t give a picture of how money is being used.
Alabama State Superintendent Eric Mackey told AL.com he isn’t surprised by a lack of a positive relationship between spending and achievement statewide.
“But you can’t say that money doesn’t matter,” he said, especially in schools where large numbers of students are poor. “There are young people in schools getting opportunities that they otherwise would not have had.”
And, he added, while test scores are important because they reflect academic achievement, “They are not the only value that we get out of schools.”
How much money do schools receive?
A first look at the overall 2018-19 spending data, which was the most recent dataset nationally available, showed similar top-level findings as the first round of federal school-level spending data did for the 2017-18 school year.
Like last time, we found high schools generally spent more money on students, with lower spending in elementary and middle schools. And schools that serve special populations like students who are medically fragile spend four to five times the per student amount at non-specialized schools.
Virtual schools had very low total spending per student – $448 at Eufaula’s Alabama Virtual Academy and $1,678 per student at the Limestone County Virtual School. Genesis Innovative School in Conecuh County spent $3,893 per student.
Statewide, spending per student averaged $10,100, up from $9,700 the year before. Schools have three buckets of money: state, federal, and local. State and federal funding is highly regulated, but local funding has more flexibility.
Of the $10,100 average statewide funding, $6,600 came from state funds, $1,400 from federal funds, and $2,100 from local funding. But the range of spending was wide.
Total spending in non-specialized schools ranged from a high of $20,320 per student at Loachapoka High School in Lee County — which had the highest total in the 2017-18 school year, too — to a low of $5,994 per student at Morgan County’s West Morgan Middle School.
What does it mean?
While we had looked at total levels of spending before, for this project, we dove deeper, using basic statistical methods to determine whether schools that spent more local tax money on students saw higher test results in reading and math.
That can be tricky because typically, schools with more local tax money are in wealthy school districts that have a strong tax base. But across a district, the amount of local money spent can vary greatly.
For example, Mountain Brook High School, located in the wealthiest city in Alabama, spent $13,933 per student of which $9,025 was from local taxes. In the same district, at Mountain Brook Junior High, of the $12,244 total spent, $5,652 came from local funds. Both schools performed well on tests in reading and math.
At the other end of the local taxes scale is Marion County’s Guin Elementary School, where of the total $10,376 spent, $259 came from local taxes. But even with 60% of students in poverty, 82.5% of students were proficient in math, just a half point lower than Mountain Brook’s Brookwood Forest Elementary where records show no students in poverty and where the school spent $13,183 per student, of which $5,964 came from local taxes.
AL.com recently took a look at schools like Guin Elementary, with high levels of poverty and high achievement on tests and not a lot of local money to spend.
We found 43 schools statewide who met those parameters and visited five of them to see how they were finding success with little local money–where the most flexibility is–to spend. Common strategies emerged: supporting teachers and helping them grow, using test data gathered throughout the school year to drive instruction, and embedding a culture of high expectations and love of learning.
For these high flying schools, money wasn’t a barrier to success, but the success they built took many years.
A look at the 25 lowest-achieving schools in the state — each had fewer than 10% of students show proficiency in math and all but two were middle or high schools — showed local spending ranged from $544 per student to a high of $11,633 per student. Total spending in those same 25 schools ranged from $7,701 to $19,712.
Poverty levels were high in those schools, ranging from 60% to 90%, further documentation of the struggle students have where the concentration of poverty is high.
Eric Hanushek of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University has studied school funding and outcomes for decades. Based on early research, he concluded that simply increasing school funding didn’t mean better outcomes.
In a 2019 Education Week interview, Hanushek said that doesn’t mean that money doesn’t matter. “It’s not that resources don’t matter and that they can’t matter,” he said. “It’s that you can’t trust that you can just drop in a pile of money and expect good performance to come out.”
Researcher C. Kirabo Jackson has criticized Hanushek’s research as being outdated. He dug deeper into spending data, following the impact of increased funding over a period of time and reached a different conclusion: money, particularly how it is spent, matters a lot. His most recent research concluded that increasing per student spending for four years will improve test scores along with educational attainment over 90% of the time.
Mackey said how schools spend money and what they spend it on matters a lot. “There are a lot of places where money is being spent the right way, whether that’s for extra tutors or lower class sizes. The key takeaway for me is that [money] is not a magic bullet, but certainly you can use money to improve learning.”
Like Mackey, Deputy Superintendent Andy Craig, who oversees spending at the state department, said how money is spent matters. He cautioned against reading too much into school-level totals because the numbers don’t give enough detail to know whether money is being spent wisely.
“There are way too many different ways [the money] can be spent,” Craig said. “I don’t think you can glean any of those details from what’s reported in the total amounts.”
While there are vast disparities in the amount of local money communities have to invest in their schools, Alabama schools are getting an unprecedented infusion of federal dollars – $3.3 billion – to help students recover from two school years disrupted by the pandemic.
But there are no clear guidebooks out there to help school officials know how best to spend that money and there are a lot of vendors hawking their products as a tool for improvement.
All districts are required to submit plans to the state department for how they plan to spend federal COVID relief, and those plans must be posted on the district’s websites for the public to see.
Mackey said the state department has beefed up resources to help school officials create their plans, including contracting with retired superintendents and chief financial officers to offer one on one help to schools in crafting their plans.
Adam Pearson, whose Huntsville-based company GlimpseK12 helps school officials determine which expenditures result in the best educational outcomes, said many school officials struggle to evaluate those outcomes.
“It’s very difficult for school districts to understand the relationship between what we are purchasing and putting in front of students versus the outcomes that they’re creating,” Pearson said.
His team of analysts helps school districts identify connections between products bought and implemented or personnel hires to student outcomes to see if whatever officials spent money on – additional teachers, new computer assessments, for example – moved the needle for students.
Ultimately, he said, the goal is to eliminate ineffective or wasteful spending and hone in on the interventions that work best for a school’s students.
“We look for the recipe that’s driving the most growth for students,” he said.
“If everybody kind of gets rowing in the same direction, I think there’s a real opportunity to springboard our students even beyond where the learning loss started, as long as you’re looking at and implementing a continuous improvement process.”
See for yourself and learn more
The table below depicts 2018-19 test scores and per student expenditures in total and broken down by source — local, state, and federal. Click here if you are unable to see the table.
University of Alabama at Birmingham researcher Peter Jones, along with students Kyle Adams and Faiza Mawani, created a series of maps depicting the total amount each public school in the state spent during the 2018-19 school year. Click here to see those maps.
And then we need your help! We want to take a closer look at how funding impacts local schools! Send us a picture of your school that you think best represents community input and funding. We’re looking for images of classrooms, gyms, labs, equipment, textbooks and more. Email an image to alabamaedlab@al.com or use the Dropbox link on the map page. Be sure to include the school and district in your file name.
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How much does Alabama school funding impact student achievement? - AL.com
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