Assembling an Open-Access School-by-School Spending Data Archive

Co-Principal Investigator: O'Hara, Amy

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) requires states to publish financial data by the unit of the school, but it would take effort beyond meeting the ESSA requirement in order for the data to be available for and usable by researchers or policymakers. The purpose of this grant is to develop a school spending data archive of data from 10 states. It is expected that such an archive will both be a useful step toward making cost-related data available to researchers and practitioners and forming a national standard for measures that constitute total per-pupil expenditure at the school level. This will also help to inform cost analyses as now required for IES grants.

This project will create a rigorous, replicable norming methodology to reliably define and account for total per-pupil expenditures broken out by the unit of the school, using adjustments where warranted in the data. As part of the process, the researchers will establish common definitions of per-pupil expenditures by school norming reported figures to standardized district expenditures and the appropriate variable inputs, which will be included in the final dataset. The project also involves establishing an approach to apportion or impute expenditures that are insufficiently accounted for by school.