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The
author, in the situation to which he aspires.
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Virginia's Standards
of Learning scores are up again this year.
Property taxes are higher as well. You
may wonder if there is a relationship.
Questing
always for Truth, we turn to the raw
SOL scores for 2002 that the Department of
Education (DOE) has thoughtfully posted on
the web. These preliminary scores are not corrected
for special ed. students et
al. but they give an early look at the
educational return for our tax money.
DOE
also has made available a preliminary draft report
of educational
expenditures for operations in the 2000-01 school year.[1]
Placed
together, these data let us see what kind of SOL
performance we are getting for our educational
expenditures. Here
are the raw numbers for the 129 school divisions that
are present in both data sets.[2]
A
glance at the graph above suggests that the
average expenditure is over $7,000 and the average SOL is nearly
75. The
computer pins those numbers down:
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Mean
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Expenditure
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$
7,651
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SOL
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73.8
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The
ideal school division would obtain high SOL scores
at low cost. To
illustrate that principle, let’s turn the
expenditure axis around so low costs appear at the
high end of the axis. To establish a baseline, we
can plot the scores and
expenditures as deviations from the averages.
On
the resulting graph below, high test scores are at the top
and low expenditures are to the right.
The best outcome for the lowest cost -- the
biggest bang per buck -- will be at the upper
right. We
might call the resulting graph the Bacon’s
Rebellion Bang per Buck graph.
The
top school division in terms of bang per buck --
or scholars per dollar -- shown by the green
symbol in the upper right corner, is the city of
Poquoson. The
small Hampton Roads locality turned out an SOL
score of 90.9, 17.1 points above the average, at a
cost per pupil of $6,111, or $1,450 below the
average.
In
contrast, the citizens of Charlottesville
-- the red symbol at lower left -- paid $10,833
per pupil, $3,272 more than the average, to obtain
an average SOL of 58.9, 14.8 points below the
average.
The
high cost, high performance jurisdiction is Falls
Church -- the blue symbol in the upper left --
where citizens paid $12,022 per pupil, $4,461 more
than average, to obtain an average SOL of 85.6,
11.8 points above the average.
The
low cost, low performance jurisdiction -- the
yellow symbol at lower right in the graph -- is Petersburg, where $6,829 per pupil, $732 below the average,
bought the lowest SOL average in Virginia, 40.1, 33.6 points below the average).
A
glance at the graph suggests that increased
spending does nothing for SOL scores. Indeed, the
least squares fit to the data (the magenta line on
the chart below) implies that a spending increase
of $1,000 correlates with a SOL reduction of 0.6
points!
Perhaps it is time for more of us to
tell our school boards to lower their costs and
improve their SOLs, lest we all move to Poquoson.
Send
an email to John
if you would like the spreadsheets with these
data.
-- October
14, 2002
[1]
“Operations”
include regular day school, school food
services, summer school, and other education,
but do not include debt service and capital
outlay additions.
I computed the division averages by averaging
the scores for each test in the division.
As Click and Clack correctly explained
the other Saturday, the average of averages is
not itself an average (unless the number of
values in each data set is the same).
Unfortunately, when I asked
the Department of Education for the underlying
data that would allow a proper calculation,
they wanted $700 before they would provide the
information. Until
someone with $700 to waste comes along,
we’ll have to be satisfied with this
approximate calculation of the averages.
Sources
The Virginia
Department of Education source for the SOLs
is: http://www.pen.k12.va.us/VDOE/Assessment/2002SOLpassrates.html
The
VDOE source for financial data is Table 15 at http://www.pen.k12.va.us/VDOE/Publications/asrstat/2000
-01/asrbook.html
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