New tool sheds light on role of money in education
A new interactive tool allows users to compare spending and demographic information for schools across Massachusetts, data points that the business group behind the resource hopes will help inform the development of a school funding reform bill.
Ed Lambert, executive director of the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education, said there "should be some accountability in this upcoming bill that shows the money is following the students."
"There's no direct correlation between money being spent and the results," Lambert told the News Service.
The federal Every Student Succeeds Act required states to publicly report spending by school. The business alliance used the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education's 2017 spending data to create its comparison tool, which displays per-student spending statistics along with a school's percentage of low-income students, English language learners, special education students, and students scoring at grade-level in English and math.
The alliance said its analysis of the information shows little correlation between spending and the percentage of students who are at grade level, with results varying among schools with similar populations.
Joe Esposito, an MBAE board member who served on a commission that in 2015 reported the current funding formula underestimates the cost of education by $1 billion a year, said the lack of correlation "keeps jumping out" when viewing different school data.
"When we talk equity, we're talking about outcomes and performance. Usually equity's talked about as just money," Esposito said
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