Our research suggests most school board trustees are simply going through the motions when it comes to budget deliberations. They’re effectively approving enormously consequential decisions about how to deploy their district’s mega-budgets without appropriate discussion of the alternatives. Rarely do they discuss long-term impacts to their districts’ financial sustainability or to their primary mission of ensuring students learn to read and do math.
The financial strains that districts face demand much more robust decision-making processes, where leaders carefully weigh a range of choices while focusing steadfastly on what’s best for the students they serve. We conclude that modest policy changes at the state and local level could go a long way toward ensuring that school boards are ready and able to perform these roles with fidelity.
About the project:
Researchers studied school boards’ deliberations on spending education funds and whether return-on-investment (ROI) training would change financial deliberations of school boards. The ROI training included 8 hours of virtual modules that cover basic budgeting processes, managing vendor contracts against ROI, as well as cost and outcomes in budget tradeoffs, etc. The ROI training took place during fall or winter of the 2022–23 school year.
This 12-month project consists of 2 separate but interrelated studies. The first study answers the questions “What do school board financial deliberations look like?” and “What opportunities and barriers affect their role in financial decision-making?” The second study addresses the question “How do deliberations change for board members that have participated in training that involves exposure to an ROI framework that weighs financial tradeoffs, new data tools, and new deliberation processes?”
The coding tool, study sample, dataset, and free training materials to help school board members connect spending and outcomes are all available to view/download.
The research reported here was supported by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through Grant R305U230001 to Georgetown University. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent views of the Institute or the U.S. Department of Education.
