Apr 11, 2024 | School Funding, The View from the OEP
by Josh B. McGee Last week’s blog discussed the sources of Arkansas school funding and some of the basics about how the state’s funding formula works. As a quick review, Arkansas has a student-based funding formula that provides districts with a foundation amount for...
Apr 3, 2024 | School Funding, The View from the OEP
by Josh McGee Today’s blog is the first in a series about Arkansas school funding. Our goal is to provide straightforward, data-driven explanations of things like: How the Arkansas K-12 funding system works; How our education funding compares to other states; How the...
Jan 29, 2020 | School Funding, The View from the OEP
Over the past few months we’ve written several posts about school spending. Most recently, we showed that there appears to be essentially no relationship between spending and test score growth. Of course the aim of education is broader than just test score growth, but...
Dec 4, 2019 | School Funding, The View from the OEP
We’ve been thinking a lot this week about school-level expenditures, and if the expenditures relate to student academic growth. We think that growth is the best reflection of the effect that a school is having on student learning. Spoiler Alert: there is...
Aug 8, 2019 | School Funding, The View from the OEP
Back in May we dug into the brand-new school-level spending data in two blog posts. In our first post we showed that Arkansas’ schools spend most of their money on people (76%) and instruction (56%). We also showed that schools with higher poverty levels, as measured...
May 22, 2019 | School Funding, The View from the OEP
Two weeks ago we provided a first look at Arkansas’ brand new school-level spending data. Today we dig a little deeper to look at how spending varies by school level. We show that there is significant variation in spending based on the grades schools serve, and we...