And the Best Deal in Education Is…. Poquoson!

In its new study, “No Guarantees: Rating the Cost Efficiency of Virginia’s School Districts,” the Clare Booth Luce Policy Institute (CPLPI) rates Virginia school districts by how much educational bang they deliver for the buck. Those five municipalities topped the list as “high achievement” school districts providing education at the lowest cost.

The worst deals in education — the lowest achieving school districts at the highest cost — include the cities of Petersburg, Charlottesville, Roanoke and Martinsville, as well as a number of less populous counties in Southside and Southwest Virginia.

Compare school districts of similar wealth and percentage of disadvantaged students, CPLPI argues, and you still get widely varying results. Take, for example, Poquoson (in Hampton Roads) and Falls Church (in Northern Virginia), which are of similar size, have similar student enrollments and similar percentages of economically disadvantaged student populations (7.6 percent and 7.4 percent, respectively). Both districts produce high achievement: Poquoson and Falls Church rank second and third, respectively, in Goal-Attainment Average in the state. However:

The two cities were not comparable in terms of Cost-Benefit Value. … Poquoson’s CBV of $77.68 is the best in the state, while Falls Church [after adjusting for higher teacher salaries in Northern Virginia] had a CBV of $136.28, the fifteenth worst in the state.

Falls Church is an affluent area boasting per capita personal income significantly higher than Poquoson, which is just shy of the state average. Yet Poquoson residents were served more cost-efficiently than their wealthier neighbors to the north, who “paid” an adjusted unit price 75 percent higher for similar student achievement results.

Bacon’s bottom line: The public education lobby has successfully defined the “solution” to improving the educational outcomes of Virginia’s youth as giving more money to public schools. I call it the “mo’ money” syndrome. The educrats have obfuscated the differences in managerial performance by blaming disparite outcomes on the differing socio-economic characteristics of school district populations. But the CBLPI study shows that some school systems do a better job than others.

Before dumping billions of dollars more into Virginia’s school districts — usually on the pretext that the worst-performing districts desperately need help — taxpayers should demand more accountability from school boards and administrations. Taxpayers cannot afford to continue writing blank checks. And students, who are preparing to enter a globally competitive economy, cannot afford a sub-par education.