Dive Brief:

• Isolating spending down to the per-pupil level by subject and grade can help schools and districts be strategic about their budgets, revealing patterns and priorities in spending, according to research by Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab and a research professor at Georgetown University.
• In one district that analyzed spending this way, math courses cost only 75% as much as English courses and 60% as much as foreign language courses; in another, core classes cost $950 per student while non-core classes cost $1,206; and advanced placement courses in a third district cost more than twice as much as remedial and regular courses.
• Roza, in a piece for EducationNext, writes administrators can think more deeply about teacher salary schedules and assignments, class sizes and course offerings, and school schedules when armed with such detailed financial information, and she says the method should be used as a management tool, used periodically to analyze spending rather than incorporated into routine accounting.

Dive Insight:

Most districts don’t keep track of spending on a per-pupil basis at the classroom level. Few do even at a school level, instead opting for averaging out spending across their entire districts. But the Every Student Succeeds Act will require states to report per-pupil spending at the school level once it is fully implemented.

While the Obama administration never finalized its regulations about the “supplement not supplant” provision of the federal education law, meaning districts will not have to change how they prove they use federal dollars to spend more on high-poverty schools, ESSA will still make very clear whether there are spending disparities within districts.