In 2011, the Center for American Progress released a report to attempt to evaluate the productivity of almost every major school district using a set of productivity metrics to measure achievement relative to spending. According to the first report the nation suffered from a productivity crisis, and the current report shows that productivity has still not become part of the reform conversation. You can read the full report here, and find a summary of the report’s most recent findings below.

• Low educational productivity remains a deeply pressing problem, with billions of dollars lost in low-capacity districts. Thousands of school districts ranked poorly on at least one of our productivity metrics; hundreds showed low scores on all three of our productivity metrics. The lowest productivity school districts serve about 3 percent of the more than 41 million students covered by our study. (Note that the productivity rankings for 2014 cannot be compared to the rankings in previous years, due to methodological limitations)
• Some of the nation’s most affluent school systems show a worrying lack of productivity. Our analysis showed that after accounting for factors outside of a district’s control, many high-spending districts posted middling productivity results. For example, only slightly more than one-third of the districts in the top third in spending were also in the top third in achievement.
• In some districts, spending priorities are clearly misplaced. Texas is one of the few states that report athletic spending at the district level, and the state’s data suggest that more than 100 districts in Texas spend upward of $500 per student on athletics. A few districts in Texas spend more than $1,000 per student annually on athletics. To keep these numbers in perspective, the average unadjusted per-pupil operating expenditure in the state in 2013 was around $10,000.
• State approaches to improving fiscal effectiveness vary widely. Only a few states, such as Rhode Island, currently take a weighted-student funding based approach to education, where money is distributed to schools based on student need. What’s more, only two states, Florida and Texas, regularly rate the productivity of local school dollars. Some policymakers are taking on the issue of productivity, however, and some states, such as New York and Virginia, have taken smart capacity-building approaches.
• States have failed to make fiscal equity a priority and large funding gaps exist across school districts. In our analysis, we calculated the expenditure difference between a district that spends near the top and near the bottom in each state. This is a long-standing approach to measuring school finance inequity, and using the latest spending data provided by the federal government, we found that gaps among school districts remain high. In New Jersey, the difference between the wealthiest districts and the least wealthy district was $6,200, after adjusting for cost of living and student demographics. For this reason, we took significant steps in our report to control for funding disparities.
• State budget practices are often inconsistent and opaque. Key expenditure-related definitions vary, and while almost every state now has a common chart of accounts a type of budget dictionary the specifics are not comparable across states. This means that what might count as curriculum spending in one state is most likely different than what counts as curriculum spending in another state.