Hey guys. Hope all is well. Wrote an article recently exploring school finance data from the 2019 Census in rural states, and I noticed something both interesting and sad after making some plots using geopandas.
Full article here: https://samholmes285.substack.com/p/why-the-most-expensive-schools-in
Basically, in rural states, many of the school districts that spend the most per student on paper actually have < 200 students in the district, which suggests that these kids have it made. Sadly, a lot of it is just going to overhead, like paying staff, bus drivers, and utilities for buildings that aren't getting filled to capacity.
I wonder, would it be feasible for these states to follow in the footsteps of another state like Vermont? They've adopted an aggressive robin hood strategy for redistributing property tax revenue from rich areas to poor, and I'm in love with it and wish it was done in every state. However, I know they have the luxury of rich ski towns where these states don't. What do yall think? Feasible?
by holmess2013
7 Comments
This can be due to Title V funding. I used to work with Title I schools and they also had high amount spent per student but it’s because their funds are being sunk into services to support communities without funds. They’re not ‘flush with cash’. They’re supporting communities with either low achievement scores, low income, low access to resources, or a combination of the three.
Schools can also get Title I and Title V funding. You need to do a lot more research before you come to conclusions.
Thinking about this further I hope your account is ai cause if you’re actually getting published and have a doctorate thinking like this I’m concerned.
The data analyzed in this article was from the 2019 Census, speciifically 5 year estimates of student populations (pulled using the census API in python) and school finance data, which I downloaded directly here [https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2019/econ/school-finances/secondary-education-finance.html](https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2019/econ/school-finances/secondary-education-finance.html)
I used geopandas and matplotlib in python to generate the visualizations, and all of the input files and code are here on my github repo for my substack, Beyond The Tribe: [https://github.com/holmess2013/Beyond_The_Tribe/tree/main/Why_the_most_expensive_schools_in_America_are_actually_poor](https://github.com/holmess2013/Beyond_The_Tribe/tree/main/Why_the_most_expensive_schools_in_America_are_actually_poor)
Oklahoma is a lost cause. Last in any relevant metric. Not even worth looking into
What a weirdly opinionated post.
“Here’s a map of something I don’t understand. Gee I just love the idea of wealth redistribution, gang!”
One clean solution that could help with the overhead problem of having certain fixed administrative staff for every district is simply having fewer districts. A natural alignment would be making school districts coterminous with counties, which is what Florida and some other states do; there is simply no need for Missouri or Oklahoma to have over 500 school districts apiece. Lots of places in the United States suffer from having too many overlapping layers of government that intersect in haphazard ways; considering local administration outside of New England tends to be largely aligned with counties anyway, it would be an improvement to consolidate school administration the same way.
“Sadly, a lot of it is going to…paying teachers…”
What a weird thing to not like. Time and time again, we hear about teachers being underpaid for the work they do, and you find it sad that they’re getting paid?
In western OK many of these schools actually are the richest full stop due to as valorem revenue generated by wind farms. As in so much revenue that they are no longer eligible for state funding because they have too much money. This frees up state revenue for poorer districts without as valuable of ad valorem resources. These property tax dollars cannot be spent on employee salaries, but must be invested into the schools’ properties and resources.