Estimates from the Kansas Department of Education show that school funding would set new records under the block grant proposal, writes Dave Trabert of Kansas Policy Institute.
The debate over whether to replace the current school funding formula with a temporary block grant exposed one of the greatest challenges facing public education in Kansas. Most school administrators and the special interest groups that lined up in opposition of the proposal focused almost exclusively on their institutional desire for more money and only mentioned students in the context of how they would suffer if the institutions’ demands are not met.
Every Legislative Post Audit study on schools has found them to be inefficient operators, but no administrators opposing the block grants said they would choose to operate efficiently if they wanted more money for instruction under the block grants. School administrators testifying before the K-12 Commission on Efficiency acknowledged that more money could go to classrooms if they outsourced certain functions, but no one opposing the block grants offered up those solutions. No one said that block grants would force them to cut back on their multiple layers of administration or use much of their $857 million in cash reserves. The message was pretty clear; give institutions what they want or the students will suffer.
Opponents also didn’t let facts get in their way. One superintendent said the current formula is “… tied to what it costs to educate kids” but that is a demonstrably false statement. The current formula is based on a cost study that has been proven to be deliberately skewed to produce inflated numbers. Legislative Post Audit gave legislators some estimates years ago but stressed that those estimates were only based on a specific set of variables and said “different decisions or assumptions can result in very different cost estimates.” Even the State Supreme Court said cost studies are “… more akin to estimates that the certainties …” suggested by the district court.
Administrators spoke of how much they would be “cut” under the block grants but that is largely government-speak for not getting as much of an increase as they want. Estimates from the Kansas Department of Education show that school funding would set new records under the block grant proposal, at $6.147 billion or $13,347 per pupil; only $3 million of the $171 million increase this year is for KPERS.
School funding has increased by more than $3 billion since 1998 and is $1.5 billion higher than if adjusted for enrollment and inflation. Yet only 36 percent of White students scored well enough on the 2014 ACT exam to be considered college-ready in English, Reading, Math and Science; it’s even worse for Hispanic and African American students, at 14 percent and 7 percent, respectively. Only 38 percent of 4th Grade students are Proficient in Reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and Low Income 4th Graders are almost three years’ worth of learning behind everyone else — in the 4th Grade!
The old school formula certainly gave institutions a lot more money but it didn’t work for students. The new formula should hold districts accountable for improving outcomes; it should also be transparent and require efficient use taxpayer money.
Kansas school funding is at a record high this year and is projected to rise next year, writes Dave Trabert of Kansas Policy Institute.
School funding still sets new record with block grant proposal
By Dave Trabert
You wouldn’t know it from media reports or school district newsletters, but school funding will still set another new record this year. Superintendents say they are dealing with budget cuts but that is largely government-speak for not getting as much of an increase as they would like — and media laps it up without asking how this year’s funding compares with last year.
The Kansas Department of Education (KDSE) says the proposed block grants for the current school year total $3.409 billion, but the block grants do not include state funding for Special Education or Bond and Interest aid. Including those amounts as listed in the Governor’s Budget Report puts total state aid at $3.985 billion. A few months ago, KSDE Deputy Superintendent of Finance Dale Dennis estimated Local aid at $1.652 billion and Federal aid at $510 million. That would put total taxpayer support at $6.147 billion this year and set a new funding record for the fourth consecutive year.
Funding per-pupil would be $13,262 (based on KSDE estimated enrollment of 463,500) and set a new record for the third consecutive year.
Total funding last year according to KSDE was $5.976 billion, so the revised estimate for this year represents a $171 million increase. Also of note, KSDE puts KPERS funding last year at $312 million and shows $315 million included in the block grant. That means — contrary to claims you might have heard — that almost all of the funding increase is not related to pension funding.
Here is a historical perspective on per-pupil school funding, adjusted upward for KPERS in the years prior to 2005 (when it wasn’t included in KSDE funding reports). The blue line shows actual funding and red line show what funding would have if adjusted for inflation each year. FYI, funding this year would be $1.503 billion less if it had just been increased for inflation and enrollment.
This month, parents and children from around Kansas rallied in the Kansas Capitol for school choice.
Speakers included James Franko of Kansas Policy Institute. He told the audience that children deserve better than what they are getting today. For many, he said that might be in a public school, but for many others it may be in a private school. Parents and their children should make that decision. It shouldn’t be based on their zip code. Individuals, not institutions, should be the focus.
Kansas now has a private school choice program. Franko told the audience that newspaper coverage of this program emphasizes how it helps private schools and hurts public schools. But we should be reading stories about how school choice helps kids, giving each child the freedom and opportunity to find the best educational fit. He explained that school choice also helps the students who remain in public schools, referring to a Friedman Foundation for Education Choice study. “It’s about helping every single child,” he said.
The study Franko mentioned is A Win-Win Solution: The Empirical Evidence on School Choice. In its executive summary, author Greg Forster, Ph.D. writes “Opponents frequently claim school choice does not benefit participants, hurts public schools, costs taxpayers, facilitates segregation, and even undermines democracy. However, the empirical evidence consistently shows that choice improves academic outcomes for participants and public schools, saves taxpayer money, moves students into more integrated classrooms, and strengthens the shared civic values and practices essential to American democracy.”
Later, the specific finding that Franko used in his talk: “Twenty-three empirical studies (including all methods) have examined school choice’s impact on academic outcomes in public schools. Of these, 22 find that choice improves public schools and one finds no visible impact. No empirical study has found that choice harms public schools.”
Michael Chartier of the Friedman Foundation for Education Choice said that there are now 51 school choice programs in 24 states plus the District of Columbia.
Andrea Hillebert, principal of Mater Dei Catholic School in Topeka told the audience that school choice benefits families, schools, and the state. Families can choose the learning environment that is best for their children, and are not penalized if they choose a school that is not run by the government. She told the audience that “school choice encourages — requires — families to take an active role in shaping their students’ future.” Schools benefit because consumer choice is a catalyst for innovating programming and continuous improvement. The state benefits from the increased achievement of students in non-public schools.
Susan Estes of Americans for Prosperity – Kansas explained that even as a former public schoolteacher, it has been a challenge for her to navigate the school system so that the needs of her three children were met. She said that parents not only deserve, but have the right to be the primary decision maker for their children.
Bishop Wade Moore, founder and principal of Urban Preparatory Academy in Wichita, completed the program. Urban Prep is a new private school in northeast Wichita, and students from that school attended the rally. He said that our legislators have “a moral responsibility to do what is right for each Kansas kid.” He mentioned the students that are pushed through the system until they graduate, but are unprepared for college, trade school, or employment. “A lot of those children have no chance at life. So we say that we have a crisis in this nation,” he said.
Alluding to how Kansas has few school choice programs, Moore said “It’s time for us to wake up and move ahead, like the rest of the nation, in education reform.” He said that he heard a school superintendent make the statement that our children and parents have a choice in education. He said “They can choose one of our schools to attend.” That is not choice, Moore said. Real choice is when parents have the opportunity to go outside the public school system.
The reason for the poor academic performance of many children is that their parents have not had choice and control over the children’s education. “It is imperative that all children, regardless of their race, gender, place of residence, and socio-economic status, learn the concepts and strategies necessary for them to develop and succeed,” he told the audience.
Resolving school district spending variances could yield hundreds of millions in savings
By Dave Trabert
School districts spent an average $12,960 per student during the 2014 school year but the range of spending across districts varied quite significantly. Total spending went from a low of $9,245 per-pupil (USD 218 Elkhart, with 1,137 students) to a high of $23,861 (USD 490 El Dorado, 1,872 students); El Dorado also hosted a Special Ed Co-Op and must record the cost of serving students in other districts per KSDE. USD 359 Argonia had the highest spending per-pupil among districts that did not host Special Ed Co-Ops, spending $22,847 with 162 students enrolled.
Instruction spending variances can be somewhat driven by the school funding formula and student body compositions (extra money is given to districts for special education, low income students and bi-lingual students) but districts have a great deal of latitude in resource allocation. Some districts, for example, divert money from Instruction as a result of other spending decisions. Variances in spending on Administration and other cost centers, however, are primarily driven by district operating decisions.
Many Kansas school districts have low enrollment, and while it would be expected that very small districts would spend more per-pupil because of economies of scale, some small districts are able to operate at lower prices per student than many larger districts. There are also wide variances even among districts of similar size.
A complete analysis of all operating cost centers (including Operations/Maintenance, Transportation, Food Service and Community Service can be found here.
To put these variances in perspective, KPI staff calculated the potential savings of getting each district spending above median within their enrollment category down to the median for each cost center. The total comes to a staggering $516 million. There may be some circumstances that preclude some of that savings being realized but there could also be additional savings realized among those districts spending below median.
To be clear, the purpose of this analysis is not to say that a specific dollar amount of savings could be had if districts operate more efficiently. However, variances of this magnitude certainly indicate that efficiency efforts driven by the Legislature could easily yield nine-figure savings.
Better outcomes at a better price in Johnson County:
USD 232 De Soto and USD 231 Gardner-Edgerton
By Dave Trabert
The most recent performance and spending records of Johnson County school districts serves as a good reminder that there is no relationship between high spending and high achievement. In fact, the two districts that spend the least happen to have the best outcomes on state assessments.
Students who read grade-appropriate material with full comprehension and usually perform accurately on all grade-level math tasks are best positioned for success in college and career. Disparate demographic compositions and achievement gaps distort districts’ average scores, so student cohorts must be separately compared. De Soto and Gardner-Edgerton have the highest and second-highest percentages of income-based cohorts attaining these levels in Reading and Math and also spend the least per-pupil on current operations (no capital or debt included).
The achievement gap for low income students is common across Kansas and there are also large variances in student body compositions across districts. For example, only 8.4% of Blue Valley students are considered low income (based on eligibility for free / reduced lunch) whereas as Shawnee Mission has 37.8% who qualify as low income; eligibility for free/reduced lunch is the official metric of “income” via the Kansas Department of Education. Blue Valley’s average score benefits from having very few low income students and masks the fact that other districts do as well or better on individual student groups.
De Soto’s and Gardner-Edgerton’s superior performance has great significance for taxpayers. In fact, if the other five Johnson County districts operated at the per-pupil cost of De Soto, the burden on taxpayers could be reduced by $127.1 million! Of course, while De Soto has the lowest operating cost per-student, that doesn’t mean that the district is efficient; savings across the county would be even greater if De Soto’s costs were reduced through consolidation of non-instruction services across district lines and other efficiency opportunities.
FY 2014 per-pupil spending for each Johnson County district is shown below by cost center. Click here to download these blog tables and per-pupil spending comparisons of all Johnson County school districts, showing how spending has changed since FY 2005.
As Kansas struggles to balance the budget for this year and the next, the state needs to prepare for future budgets by resolving the problem of spending.
Click to open this visualization in a new window.Why is controlling spending important? The slow rate of growth of the Kansas economy has been a problem for years. This interactive visualization lets you compare gross domestic product growth of Kansas with other states. Kansas has reduced income taxes, but Kansas has not reduced spending to match. There is pressure to balance future budgets with tax increases instead of spending cuts. Because of the lagging performance of the Kansas economy, it’s important to reduce the footprint of state government to make room for the private sector economy to grow.
Kansas Policy Institute has provided a plan for balancing the Kansas budget. It relies on structural changes and small improvements in efficiency.
Kansas can balance its budget by improving the operations of, and reducing the cost of, state government. In 2011 the Kansas Legislature lost three opportunities to do just this. Three bills, each with this goal, were passed by the House of Representatives, but each failed to pass through the Senate, or had its contents stripped and replaced with different legislation.
Each of these bills represents a lost opportunity for state government services to be streamlined, delivered more efficiently, or measured and managed. These goals, while always important, are now essential for the success of Kansas government and the state’s economy. There is no reason why these bills, or similar measures, could not be revived. The improvements these bills would foster will not balance next year’s budget. But they will set the stage for controlling the growth of Kansas government spending. This will leave more money in the private sector, which will help Kansas grow.
Kansas Streamlining Government Act
HB 2120, according to its supplemental note, “would establish the Kansas Streamlining Government Act, which would have the purpose of improving the performance, efficiency, and operations of state government by reviewing certain state agencies, programs, boards, and commissions.” Fee-funded agencies — examples include Kansas dental board and Kansas real estate commission — would be exempt from this bill.
In more detail, the text of the bill explains: “The purposes of the Kansas streamlining government act are to improve the performance, streamline the operations, improve the effectiveness and efficiency, and reduce the operating costs of the executive branch of state government by reviewing state programs, policies, processes, original positions, staffing levels, agencies, boards and commissions, identifying those that should be eliminated, combined, reorganized, downsized or otherwise altered, and recommending proposed executive reorganization orders, executive orders, legislation, rules and regulations, or other actions to accomplish such changes and achieve such results.”
In testimony in support of this legislation, Dave Trabert, President of Kansas Policy Institute offered testimony that echoed findings of the public choice school of economics and politics: “Some people may view a particular expenditure as unnecessary to the fulfillment of a program’s or an agency’s primary mission while others may see it as essential. Absent an independent review, we are expecting government employees to put their own self-interests aside and make completely unbiased decisions on how best to spend taxpayer funds. It’s not that government employees are intentionally wasteful; it’s that they are human beings and setting self-interests aside is challenge we all face.”
Another bill that did not advance was HB 2194, which in its original form would have created the Kansas Advisory Council on Privatization and Public-Private Partnerships.
According to the supplemental note for the bill, “The purpose of the Council would be to ensure that certain state agencies, including the Board of Regents and postsecondary educational institutions, would: 1) focus on the core mission and provide goods and services efficiently and effectively; 2) develop a process to analyze opportunities to improve efficiency, cost-effectiveness and provide quality services, operations, functions, and activities; and 3) evaluate for feasibility, cost-effectiveness, and efficiency opportunities that could be outsourced. Excluded from the state agencies covered by the bill would be any entity not receiving State General Fund or federal funds appropriation.”
This bill passed by a vote of 68 to 51 in the House of Representatives. It did not advance in the Senate, falling victim to a “gut-and-go” maneuver where its contents were replaced with legislation on an entirely different topic.
Opposing this bill was Kansas Organization of State Employees (KOSE), a union for executive branch state employees. It advised its “brothers and sisters” that the bill “… establishes a partisan commission of big-business interests to privatize state services putting a wolf in charge of the hen house. To be clear, this bill allows for future privatization of nearly all services provided by state workers. Make no mistake, this proposal is a privatization scheme that will begin the process of outsourcing our work to private contractors. Under a privatization scheme for any state agency or service, the employees involved will lose their rights under our MOA and will be forced to adhere to the whims of a private contractor who typically provides less pay and poor benefits. Most workers affected by privatization schemes are not guaranteed to keep their jobs once an agency or service is outsourced.”
Note the use of “outsourcing our work.” This underscores the sense of entitlement of many government workers: It is not work done for the benefit of Kansans; to them it is our work.
Then, there’s the warning that private industry pays less. Most of the time representatives of state workers like KOSE make the case that it is they who are underpaid, but here the argument is turned around when it supports the case they want to make. One thing is probably true: Benefits — at least pension plans — may be lower in the private sector. But we’re now painfully aware that state government has promised its workers more pension benefits than the state has been willing to fund.
Performance measures
Another bill that didn’t pass the entire legislature was HB 2158, which would have created performance measures for state agencies and reported that information to the public. The supplemental note says that the bill “as amended, would institute a new process for modifying current performance measures and establishing new standardized performance measures to be used by all state agencies in support of the annual budget requests. State agencies would be required to consult with representatives of the Director of the Budget and the Legislative Research Department to modify each agency’s current performance measures, to standardize such performance measures, and to utilize best practices in all state agencies.” Results of the performance measures would be posted on a public website.
This bill passed the House of Representatives by a nearly unanimous vote of 119 to 2. In the Senate, this bill was stripped of its content using the “gut-and-go” procedure and did not proceed intact to a vote.
Opposition to these bills from Democrats often included remarks on the irony of those who were recently elected on the promise of shrinking government now proposing to enlarge government through the creation of these commissions and councils. These bills, however, proposed to spend modest amounts increasing the manageability of government, not the actual range and scope of government itself. As it turns out, many in the legislature — this includes Senate Republicans who initiated or went along with the legislative maneuvers that killed these bills — are happy with the operations of state government remaining in the shadows.
These proposals to scale back the services that government provides — or to have existing services be delivered by the private sector — mean that there will be fewer government employees, and fewer members of government worker unions. This is another fertile area of gathering support for killing these bills.
State workers and their supporters also argue that fewer state workers mean fewer people paying state and other taxes. Forgotten by them is the fact that the taxes taken to pay these workers means less economic activity and fewer jobs in the private sector.
As to not wanting performance measures: Supporters of the status quo say that people outside of government don’t understand how to make the decisions that government workers make. In one sense, this may be true. In the private sector, profitability is the benchmark of success. Government has no comparable measure when it decides to, say, spend some $300 million to renovate the Kansas Capitol. But once it decides to do so, the benchmark and measurement of profitability in executing the service can be utilized by private sector operators. Of course, private contractors will be subject to the discipline of the profit and loss system, something again missing from government.
In this excerpt from WichitaLiberty.TV: What is the trend in Kansas school employment? Then, what do citizens know about Kansas school spending? Finally, what did Milton Friedman have to say about private vs. government spending? View below, or click here to view at YouTube. Originally boradcast November 23, 2014.
Judicial panel used cherry-picked data in Gannon decision
By David Dorsey
(w)e conclude that the Kansas K-12 school finance formula still stands as constitutionally inadequate by its failure to assure and implement adequate funding to meet and sustain a constitutionally adequate education as a matter of sound expert opinion from those with relevant and reliable expertise and experience with the Kansas K-12 school system.(emphasis added)
Thus is the opinion, filed December 30, 2014, from the Shawnee County District Court three-judge panel as tasked by the Kansas Supreme Court pursuant to their decision in Gannon v. Kansas in March of 2014.
We reported in a previous KPI blog that the unspecified underfunding of K-12 public education in Kansas identified in this decision is at least $548 million. The judges based their opinion on several categories of adequacy they deemed relevant to the case. One such category in the decision is entitled Adequacy As A Matter Of Student Performance (pp. 20-48). The judges included as its linchpin evidence an interview with Kansas City, Kansas USD 500 superintendent Dr. Cynthia Lane. Dr. Lane provided testimony regarding how a federal grant enabled Emerson Elementary, a USD 500 school, to significantly increase student performance.
In short, Emerson Elementary is a small K-5 school. Several years ago, it gained notoriety for being declared the lowest performing elementary school in Kansas. As such, it was awarded a School Improvement Grant (SIG) from KSDE, authorized by the No Child Left Behind law. The school was given nearly $3 million over a three-year period (2010-11 to 2012-13 school years) to improve state assessment test scores. Dr. Lane testified that “fewer than 30 percent” of the students met state standards in math and reading prior to receiving the grant. According to demographic data published by KSDE, Emerson has about 95% economically disadvantaged students. While Dr. Lane testified that Emerson is ethnically “about 50 percent African American and about 48 percent Hispanic,” KSDE reported that the ethnic breakdown is about two-thirds Hispanic, one-quarter African American and less than 10% white. She told the court that over the life of the grant Emerson’s students performed “on both the reading and math state assessment to have more than 85 percent … meeting or exceeding expectations just in the last three years. It’s a remarkable story.”
Apparently the court agreed, afforded to say:
Given the continuing grade advancement and migration upwards of K-12 schoolers during their school careers, it seems but obvious that for educational advancement, much less the maintenance of results accomplished prior with the earlier funding initiatives implemented, but now abandoned, that the revenue streams which supported those results in that period of favorable funding needed to be continued to be provided in order to properly educate the continuing stream of new faces going forward, either initially entering the school system or advancing in grade. No evidence or proffer of evidence supports otherwise. (pp. 39-40, emphasis not added)
Translated: More money = greater student achievement, and there is no evidence to the contrary.
I will now proffer contrary evidence, a much less remarkable story that should have been proffered in the original court case: Northwest Middle School.
The same year Emerson Elementary was awarded its SIG, another USD 500 school, Northwest Middle School, was awarded a similar grant with a higher amount of $4.77 million. Northwest has similar minority and economically disadvantaged populations to Emerson Elementary (just over half African American and just over one-third Hispanic and 98% low income). But the outcomes pursuant to the SIG were very much dissimilar, indeed.
The following table and the accompanying graph show how Northwest Middle School scored on the state reading and math assessments for the three years prior to receiving the SIG and during the three-year implementation of the grant.
As the graphics show, achievement at Northwest had an uptick in both math and reading the first year of the grant, but then fell off dramatically the following two years. To put their performance in perspective the following graphs compare Northwest to Rosedale Middle School (the USD 500 school most comparable to Northwest according to KSDE) and the USD 500 district as a whole.
In reading, Northwest underperformed both Rosedale (which did not get a SIG) and the district as a whole both prior to and after receiving the grant. The trend and gap between Northwest and Rosedale remained amazingly consistent throughout this period. The picture in math is a little different. Northwest students maintained a slight advantage over Rosedale throughout the grant period and nearly eliminated the gap with the district as a whole. However, the overall trend is downward, with just over 40% of the Northwest middle schoolers proficient in math as of the last recorded state assessments.
It is safe to say that in terms of achievement, that $4.77 million granted to Northwest Middle School in Kansas City, Kansas didn’t buy much. This is evidence that, once again, more money does not inherently make a difference in student outcomes. This nationwide study conducted by the Heritage Foundation supports that contention. Even Kansas’s own Legislative Post Audit says in this report (p. 107) that a correlation between increased funding and increased outcomes is inconclusive.
As a 20-year teaching veteran, I know it’s not the money that makes a difference in student achievement. It’s commitment by students, parents, teachers, principals and administrators to make it happen. Trying to quantify that in dollar terms is a fool’s errand. If the increase in education funding prescribed in the most recent Gannon decision were to become a reality, it would mean a nice raise for teachers and likely more administrators, but student outcomes would remain flat and achievement gaps would continue. Think of it as Montoy redux.
Clearly, the judges got it wrong. Let’s hope their decision gets overturned on appeal and an end is put to this seemingly endless carousel of education funding lawsuits. The citizens of Kansas deserve better.
The philosophy and research supporting at-risk funding –- second in a series
By David Dorsey, Kansas Policy Institute
As I discussed in the first blog in this series, the state of Kansas provides almost $400 million additionally each year for at-risk funding to K-12 education. But what is the philosophy behind spending more taxpayer dollars to educate economically disadvantaged students? What does the research say? And how have states responded in their particular “at-risk” funding formulas? In this blog I will briefly answer address these questions.
It may sound like a dumb question, but why is it that it should cost more to adequately educate students who are disadvantaged? Sure, it seems intuitive, but where did that idea start and where is the research to back it up?
The genesis of the premise that it costs more to adequately educate the economically disadvantaged comes from a 1969 article in theNational Tax Journal by three economists who attempted to explain why the cost of all local public services was outpacing inflation in post-World War II America. (Sidebar: their article is proof that the concern over rapidly expanding government spending is not a recent phenomenon.) The researchers suggested that differing costs for public service across jurisdictions could partially be explained by environmental factors. Specifically regarding education, they say that outcomes might be a function of “the ‘basic intelligence’ of pupils, home backgrounds and neighborhood conditions.” That seems to be the phrase subsequent researchers have locked onto to justify the need for what has become commonly known as at-risk funding.
Many studies since then, including this 1997 study and this one from 2004, focused on spending disparities and “outcome” disparities among school districts within states. Again, without getting too “wonky,” studies showed school districts that were property poor, and as a parallel had lower per pupil spending (since school financing is primarily a function of property values), had lower outcomes than their counterparts with higher property values. And of course, those property poor districts had a disproportionate share of low income families/students. Therefore, the studies concluded that poor school districts needed more money to bring their students up to an acceptable minimum outcome standard. Researchers typically defined outcome as an index of a combination of standardized test scores and other indicators such as graduation rates.
But these studies have remained academic exercises. Even though it is now a given that poor students require more money to reach a given outcome, most states now have some form of additional funding based on economic status of students. However, the amounts states have allocated are all less than the research concludes are necessary.
Yes, politics and budget constraints trump academia.
The Kansas At-Risk Timeline
In 1992 a new law entitled the School District Finance and Quality Performance Act included a 5% weighting for students who qualified for free school lunch. That percentage was increased to 6.5% in 1997 and increased seven more times in the next decade to its current level of 45.6%. In 2006, two more categories of at risk were added. One was for schools with high percentages of at risk populations and/or an enrollment density of at least 212.1 students per square mile. The other additional category targeted money for students non-proficient in math and reading, but not eligible for a free lunch. (The non-proficient category was eliminated in 2014.) In dollar terms, the 5% in 1992 generated just over $13 million. That amount is now nearly $400 million.
The situation in Kansas is not dissimilar to those in other states. At least 35 states have a mechanism for additional funding generated by economically disadvantaged students. Most of them use some variation of the number of students who qualify for free OR free or reduced lunches through the National School Lunch Program (NSLP). NSLP has been the choice because it is an expedient and convenient proxy for determining economically disadvantaged students since qualification for free/reduced lunches is predominantly income based. And like Kansas many have weight values that are not static. A 2004 study out of the University of Wisconsin reports that nationwide the weights range from 15% in Vermont to 62.5% in Illinois, while a presentation last year to the Nevada state legislature showed a low of 9.15% in New Mexico to 180.0% in Georgia. The thing to keep in mind here is that it is nearly impossible to compare Kansas to other states because not all states use the same definition of disadvantaged and some use multiple factors to determine additional spending.
So how did Kansas go from a relatively modest 5% at-risk weighting in 1992 to a hefty 45.6% (with two additional categories) by 2006? That is the topic of the next blog.
Next: The political history of at-risk funding in Kansas
School districts spent an average $12,960 per student during the 2014 school year but the range of spending across districts varied quite significantly. Total spending went from a low of $9,245 per-pupil (USD 218 Elkhart, with 1,137 students) to a high of $23,861 (USD 490 El Dorado, 1,872 students); El Dorado also hosted a Special Ed Co-Op and must record the cost of serving students in other districts per KSDE. USD 359 Argonia had the highest spending per-pupil among districts that did not host Special Ed Co-Ops, spending $22,847 with 162 students enrolled.
To put these variances in perspective, KPI staff calculated the potential savings of getting each district spending above median within their enrollment category down to the median for each cost center. The total comes to a staggering $516 million. There may be some circumstances that preclude some of that savings being realized but there could also be additional savings realized among those districts spending below median.
