What This Tool Can Do

This tool combines and consolidates data to clarify a district's spending patterns, allowing district leaders to analyze district expenditures in the context of equity. This analysis is a first step to prepare for student-based budgeting.

For these analyses, equity implies not equal funding for all students, but rather equal resources for similar children, with additional resources for special-needs students.

The key feature of this tool is that it relies on the conversion of dollar figures to an index – the weighted index – that takes into account the kinds of students at the school. The index measure is relative and thus allows us to compare spending levels at schools with different student populations. The tool contains no assumptions about the appropriate funding levels for different types of children; it relies on the district's own total investment for each special program as the relative comparison.

The tool will yield information to answer a host of questions, including:

• How evenly are dollars distributed among different schools in the district?
• Do schools with more students with particular needs get appropriately more resources? Do they have adequate funding for their special programs (such as bilingual education) in addition to a regular education program comparable to those of other schools in the district?
• How many (and which) schools are shortchanged in the budgeting process? How much variation exists — i.e., to what extent is there a problem?
• Are special-program dollars distributed evenly across the students that need them?
• Are there spending patterns that reveal different investments across schools of varying size, student demographics, school level, and region of the district? 

The data analysis consists of three steps:

Weighted index calculation
First, the tool takes the data entered about school and district expenditures and numbers of students and calculates an intermediate measure for each school – the weighted average expenditure (WAE) – that represents what the district would spend on that particular school if it allocated exactly the district's average expenditure for each student in each special category or need in that school. In other words, the WAE adjusts for the particular mix of students at that school.

The tool then calculates a weighted index for each school by dividing the actual budget allocations for that school by the WAE for that school. This allows for comparisons across schools with different student populations and different funding streams. The results are displayed as a chart and as a graph.

Variation among schools analysis
In the next step, the tool compares the weighted indexes for all the district's schools to each other. One chart shows the number and percentage of schools at various levels above, below, and close to the district averages. Another chart shows the maximum and minimum weighted indexes and the coefficient of variation – a statistical measure of how extreme the differences are among schools. A large coefficient of variation signals possible equity isses.

Variation among subgroups analysis
The last step refines the analysis by allowing a district to compare funding levels for subgroups of schools and students that commonly drive funding inequities. Subgroups might include, for example, school level (e.g., elementary, middle, high), school type (e.g., magnet), type of school population, or school region.

» Get Started: List of what you will need before using the tool

Back to Welcome page