The Arkansas legislature listened to a report from Paul Atkins, of the Bureau of Legislative Research, on Tuesday descriptively linking school expenditures to student achievement. You can view the report here. Mr. Atkins did a great job making it clear in his statements that legislators (and the public) should be careful drawing causal conclusions from this purely descriptive analysis, but one thing the report clearly demonstrates is that after Lakeview, we are providing our poorest districts with more resources. On the flip side, this report also demonstrates that money is not everything, or at least it can’t magically turn things around. Take a look at the following portion of the Dem Gaz article:

Regarding revenue per student from all sources (federal, state and local), the top quintile of districts received $10,753 per student.

Those same districts had the highest percentage of students – 75 percent – on free and reduced-priced lunches from the federal government. This is the indicator the state uses to show poverty.

They also had the lowest percentage of white students (58 percent) and the lowest percentage of students scoring at proficient or greater (also 58 percent) on the Arkansas Comprehensive Testing, Assessment and Accountability Program, known as ACTAAP.

Atkins also found that the quintile with the highest percentage of proficiency (81 percent) had the lowest percentage of poverty students (48 percent) and the highest percentage of white students (89 percent).

This group also posted the highest percentage of expenses on instruction, 60 percent. The lowest ACTAAP quintile spent the least on instruction, 56 percent.

Atkins said that could be because the districts with better academic scores might pay their teachers more than other districts.

It turns out that it may be how districts spend their money that really makes the difference. It is curious (or maybe not so curious) that the best performing districts spent the most on instruction. I am inclined to believe spending more in the classroom will make a difference in achievement, but this report and this data cannot answer that question exactly. It is likely true that high poverty districts need more support support staff because their children come to school with more problems. However, these poor districts also experience the greatest difficulty recruiting and retaining high quality teachers, and teacher pay is likely part of the problem. If the state is looking to, as Jimmy Jeffress said, get “any bang for our buck”, it is time  they took another look at strategies to recruit and retain high quality teachers in these poor districts.

Another interesting takeaway from the report is that by the state’s measure of growth the poorest districts, where we spend the most money, are not catching up. In fact it appears that while they are improving, the richer district’s scores are improving at a faster rate. Here is what the Dem Gaz quote:

Over the past two years, the percentage of students scoring at least at the proficient level in the quintile with the lowest ACTAAP scores went up by 9 percent from 2007 to 2009. The highest scoring quintile posted proficiency scores that were up by 12 percent.

If simply spending more money in the same old ways really did the trick, we should be seeing at least some evidence of this in the data. This report is a reminder that overcoming the difficult challenges associated with poverty require clever, innovative solutions, not just more of the same.