In this webinar we interview Jim Blew and Chris Rinkus from the U.S. Department of Education and discuss how states are fostering transparency, analysis and action regarding the school-by-school spending data. Presentation slides March 3, 2020 Webinar recording March 3, 2020
Please contact us at edunomics@georgetown.edu for accessible versions of these resources.
In advance of this meeting, NJ asked how many states were planning to allow some LEA choice in school spending recording (vs following prescriptive SEA rules). We also covered ways in which SEAs can account for shared services across districts, and how SEAs are planning to capture the data. Presentation Slides Meeting chat log Video
Many states that did not already have access to school level finance data needed to put into place new procedures and policies in order to gain access to a reliable data set. Those policies and procedures were referred to as data plans in the FiTWiG and this webinar reviews some best practices to keep in mind when drafting and publishing
At the time of this meeting, Edunomics had received a lot of questions about where states were on particular aspects of meeting the requirement. We spent the first portion of the meeting going over some state tracking questions, such as enrollment counts and data plans, and then used most of the rest of the meeting to review whether and how
Office Hours usually do not have any particular topic or structure. Instead, states are asked to submit their own questions or comments for discussion amongst themselves. A number of states sent questions in advance, and the majority of the discussion revolved around the role of the state agency in setting (or not setting) rules around LEAs coding expenditures to school
A key question since the beginning of exploring this topic has been whose role it is (SEA or LEA) to determine how non-school based (central) expenditures are (or are not) assigned to school sites. Some states take a prescriptive approach and do all cost assignment for districts, while others are less prescriptive and leave it up to districts to determine.