Yesterday I took a look at the amount of money that goes into the classroom in Arizona school districts in general. Today I’m taking a look at TUSD’s numbers.

The Auditor General’s Report of Arizona School District Spending for Fiscal Year 2015 has a two page spread for every school district in the state. The layouts are all the same, the only thing that changes are the numbers for each district. The TUSD numbers are on pages 392 and 393 if you want to look them over yourself.

The big pie graph, top left, shows the percent of the total district budget spent in various categories. The biggie is Instruction, the classroom component, which is at 48.7 percent for TUSD, well below the state average of 53.6 percent. The rest of the money is spread out over six categories: Administration, Plant operations, Food service, Transportation, Student support and Instructional support. On the second page is a graph showing how the spending percentages changed for the seven categories since 2001. In 2015, TUSD’s Administration and Food services spending end up close to where they were in 2001, and the other four non-classroom categories are up between one and two percent. Classroom instruction, on the other hand, is down five percent.

Bottom line, TUSD should spend more in the classroom, no question. Why is the Instruction percentage down since 2001 while other areas either stayed even or increased? It’s easy to use those numbers to condemn TUSD for its overall awful-ness or give reasons and rationalizations to explain the numbers. Instead, I want to ask, “Compared to what?” How do TUSD’s numbers compare to what other districts are doing?

Each district is compared to what’s called a “Peer average,” and TUSD doesn’t look good in the comparisons. Unfortunately, unless I missed something, the report doesn’t name the “peer” districts. If I’m right that the “peers” aren’t listed, we’re relying on some formula the auditors used without knowing what it is. That being said, TUSD’s “Peer average” districts put 56.5 percent of their budgets into instruction, three percent higher than the state average and eight percent over TUSD. Why, or how, are those districts devoting so much more to Instruction? Maybe they’re doing a better job with their students than TUSD. Maybe they’re better money managers. Or maybe their situations are different enough to explain some of the disparities. Without knowing the districts, I don’t have the answer.

I created a head-to-head comparison between TUSD and Catalina Foothills district to see what I could learn from two known local quantities. Cat Foothills is on pages 88 and 89 of the report if you’re following along. I chose Cat Foothills before I looked at its numbers, because it’s a local district that’s on the other end of the school district continuum from TUSD. Unlike TUSD, it’s one of the highest performing districts in the state, it has a high income population and its facilities are reasonably new. So how do the percentages stack up? I put them in the table below. 

Cat Foothills puts almost six percent more of its budget into instruction. That means it has to spend almost six percent less on the rest of its budget. So where does it save money? Not in Administration, where Cat Foothills spends almost two percent more than TUSD, which may come as a surprise to people who think that TUSD is a big administrative spender. Cat Foothills spends about two percent less on Food services. Whether that’s efficiency or the fact that it has fewer students on free/reduced lunch and/or more students who don’t eat school food, I can’t say. Cat Foothills saves another two-and-a-half percent on Transportation. Whether that’s greater efficiency or a function of a newer bus fleet, shorter transportation distances and/or more of its students getting to school using private transportation, again, I can’t say.

Student support is a big difference. TUSD spends almost three-and-a-half percent more than Cat Foothills in that category. If you add Student support to both districts’ Instruction budget, the difference between the districts shrinks from six percent to a little over two percent. It’s not hard to understand why TUSD’s student population would be more in need of support outside the classroom than the more socioeconomically advantaged students in Cat Foothills. It’s reasonable to say that TUSD’s support services are necessary for its classroom instruction to be effective.

Cat Foothills spends one percent more on Instructional support, which, so far as I know, is staff training in teaching strategies and curriculum.

Let’s look at the Cat Foothills second page graph on how its spending has changed since 2001, which I discussed earlier for TUSD. Cat Foothills’ Instructional support had the biggest gain—three percent—followed by Student support and Administration at two percent. Like TUSD, its Instruction percentage fell significantly. The biggest drop was in 2013 when it was down six percent, then it recovered in 2015 to a four-and-a-half percent drop. TUSD’s Instruction percentage, remember, is currently five percent lower than it was in 2001, not much different than the change at Cat Foothills.

Why did a highly respected district like Cat Foothills cut the amount it spends on Instruction so drastically? I imagine the reason is the same as at TUSD and other Arizona districts. When the overall budget is being cut by the state, it’s easier to keep teacher salaries down, increase class sizes and spend less on classroom textbooks and supplies than it is to lower fixed costs.

There’s lots of room for interpretation of the information in the budget report. I spent more time here discussing the data than reaching conclusions. I imagine different readers will reach wildly different conclusions, which is fine. And anyone can do similar comparisons between districts if they wish. Just go to the report, look up a few districts—they’re in alphabetical order—and do your own delving. 

This article appears in Mar 3-9, 2016.

12 replies on “A Look at TUSD’s Classroom Spending Numbers”

  1. Mr Safier,

    Yes, you did miss something, the peer groups are listed at the end of the report. Your comparison to Catalina is ludicrous, inappropriate, and meaningless.

    There are three separate peer groupings , one for efficiency, one for transportation, and one for achievement. The Auditor clearly makes a huge effort to be fair with comparisons.

    Here is the efficiency groupings for TUSD. TUSD is significantly below its peers despite getting $1300 per student in deseg funds. 6 of these 10 districts get $0 deseg funds.

    ————

    Districts grouped by operational efficiency peer group and ranked by classroom dollar percentage Fiscal year 2015

    Large and medium, large unified and union high school districts in towns and rural areas
    Classroom dollar percentage

    Peer group average 56.6%
    Gilbert USD 61.3
    Mesa USD 55.8
    Chandler USD 61.1
    Phoenix UHSD 55.4
    Deer Valley USD1 60.7
    Peoria USD 54.9
    Dysart USD1 57.4
    Scottsdale USD 53.9
    Paradise Valley USD1 57.2
    Tucson USD 48.7

  3. Cynthia, thanks for pointing out the peer group tables at the end. But I have to admit, I don’t see how those translate directly to the “Peer average” data on the TUSD page. Is TUSD being compared to three different “peer groups” depending on the category? If so, it’s hard to know what the data signifies since each of the 7 categories is a different comparison. If all the data in the “peer average” come from a single group of districts, I don’t know what that group would be. Is it Table 6 that compares the percent spent in the classroom? Is it Table 7 that compares classroom efficiency? Is it Table 8 that compares student achievement? Is it some other group of districts?

    I’m not being obtuse or difficult here. If I had a list of, say, 10 districts whose data were compiled to come up with the “peer average” for all 7 categories, I’d be interested in doing a side-by-side comparison of all the districts in the 7 categories. Without that, the comparison of a district to its “peer average” doesn’t yield valuable comparisons.

  4. Well, Safier did surprise us after all. Instead of complaining about how the deseg order forces additional administrative spending, he did something which Ms. Weiss rightly terms “ludicrous,” comparing TUSD to Catalina Foothills School District, of all things. A distinct case of “apples to oranges.”

    In the KGUN piece linked in the above comment, you find your standard-issue TUSD excuse making for its administrative costs, provided by Stephanie Boe, TUSD’s Director of Communications and Media Relations:

    KGUN asked for a response to “59 students per administrative position in contrast to peer average of 81 per administrative position.”

    Boe provided this information: “In addition to the assistant principal situations noted above, we also have mandated central office positions in the desegregation court order that no one else has, such as Culturally Relevant Curriculum Director, Multi-Cultural Curriculum Director, Magnet School Director, Advanced Learning Experiences Director, Diversity Retention and Recruitment Director, Mexican American Student Services Director, and African American Student Services Director. Each of these positions are cited in the desegregation court order and we must comply.”

    So let’s see the “apples to apples” comparison requested in a comment on another recent Safier piece: for Arizona districts under desegregation orders with between $1K and $2K to allocate (TUSD and PUHSD), how is that deseg money allocated? How is its allocation reported? How successful is the district in documenting student benefit?

    If Safier is ever willing to pursue a journalistic agenda other than what many commenters have identified as his usual role (TUSD Board majority spin-meister) he’ll take a look at this and report. (I wouldn’t hold my breath on this one, if I were you…)

  5. Mr Safier,

    Read the report, it is very clear that all peer comparisons outside of transportation and achievement are based on the peer efficiency groupings.

    Instead of waffling and claiming that anyone can read anything into the report, how about taking a stand or rising to the challenge of my question to you…

    1) Why is TUSD’s operating efficiency so poor when compared to is PEER districts (not the state average)?
    2) Why is classroom spending percentage still at it lowest point since 2001 (despite getting $1300/student in deseg funds most of its peers do not get)
    3) Why has TUSD lost 13,297 students while AZ’s population has exploded in that time?

  6. Ms. Weiss:

    RE your first question: You seem to be missing the point that the districts identified as “peer districts” for TUSD in the auditor general’s report cannot, on some levels of analysis, be considered peer districts. A comparison of PUHSD and TUSD would be illuminating: Is the former’s $1900 per pupil deseg allocation being applied in a way that achieves student benefit more consistently than the latter’s $1300 per pupil allocation does? THAT is an interesting question. Not sure what could be gained to comparing TUSD to districts with no deseg allocation or much smaller deseg allocations.

    RE your second question: What would make you think that increased desegregation funding would increase classroom spending? It might well increase support services not classified as “classroom spending,” and if support services were increased in ways that could be documented to achieve real student benefit, that would not be an inappropriate application of those funds. The right’s obsession with classroom spending v. administrative spending is in many ways misguided. And, as Putnam-Hidalgo pointed out in one of her recent comments, there’s a lot of sleight-of-hand going on in what various people define as “classroom” v. “not classroom.” The issue to examine is: what solid evidence do we have that funds applied in the classroom or outside of the classroom in support services actually achieve documentable student benefit?

    RE your third question: for loss of enrollment, the standard response from defenders of TUSD is that “white flight” to charters accounts for much of it.

    As for Safier, what makes you think he is capable of anything other than “waffling and claiming that anyone can read anything into the report”? How long have you been following his commentary on TUSD? Evidently not long enough to discern the conspicuous pattern.

  8. Hi ABQ,

    Thanks for the feedback!

    Flagstaff Unified claims it gets 92% of its deseg funds to the classroom. Both Flagg and PUHSD get more into the classroom despite having smaller economies of scale that TUSD.

    “According to district statistics, 92 percent of the funds are instructional, meaning they fund teachers or programs that are in direct contact with students. The other 8 percent of the funds are used for staff support, development and administration.”

    http://azdailysun.com/news/local/what-does-desegregation-funding-mean-in-flagstaff/article_987c504c-1b90-5b63-8594-d1cd14e459d4.html

  9. How is success defined by a liberal? Read below.

    The Arizona Auditor General released the following Fiscal Year 2015 results yesterday:

    Students attending TUSD decreased to 45,970 – a loss of 857 students in one year. During the last five years TUSD has lost 6,706 or 12.7% of its students.

    Actual classroom spending remained flat from FY 2014 at 48.7% and is over 2% less than the 51.0% presented and celebrated at the State of the District. Classroom spending has decreased by almost 10% over the past 5 years.

    Administrative, Plant Operations, and Transportation costs were all designated “Very High” compared to state and peer averages. Five years ago only Administration costs were considered “Very High”.
    Administration costs rose by $42 to $897 per student, 40% higher than peer districts on a per student basis. If TUSD Administration operated at peer levels that would create an additional $11,768,320 for the classroom or $256 per student. That number would represent a 50% increase in Instructional Support.

    https://arizonadailyindependent.com/2016/03/04/tusd-state-of-the-district-tkf-says-denial/

  10. Again, for the benefit of those capable of receiving and understanding the information:

    You can compare the numbers reported by the auditor on this school to that school all day long, and it will not tell you the important thing to know about our schools: what is happening to the students?

    Experience on a TUSD site and a couple of years of watching what gets reported to the public is all that is needed to make it clear that the biggest problem with TUSD administrators is this: they pay more attention to gaming the numbers system (% of funds applied here or there, test scores, rankings, letter grades, etc.) than they pay to the quality of the student experience. Indeed, some of them are willing to destroy the quality of the student experience and exploit students mercilessly, as long as it improves their appearance in the various numbers games they play. When the press and public continue to pay more attention to “the numbers” than to what is actually happening to the students — and when they find themselves incapable of demanding clear information on what those numbers actually mean in terms of student benefit, student experience — they encourage this trend.

    To those obsessed with percentages of classroom spending: If I increase teacher salaries, but do not have appropriate administrative programs in place to evaluate the effectiveness of teaching practices, or the appropriate professional development programs in place to give teachers more effective tools to improve their practice, that will look like increased classroom spending. But will it result in an improved student experience? No. Just one small example of how it is that the categories you pay attention to can mislead you about who is “succeeding” and who is “failing” from one school to the next. There are many examples that could be given.

  11. As an addendum to the above comment, I do want to point out that I am in favor of increasing teachers’ salaries. My point above was that transferring spending from one category to another does not always result in a direct improvement in the quality of the student experience. Of course, raising teachers’ salaries overall and sustaining the increase would eventually help with retention and how many qualified applicants make themselves available to teach, but there are some types of administrative spending (e.g. evaluation of instruction, effective professional development) that can improve the quality of the student experience. In reports like the one discussed here, you’re really not getting the level of detail to know whether the spending reported is doing the students any good or not, and putting so much emphasis on the numbers only encourages corrupt administrative behaviors, i.e. the habit of putting the numbers they advertise to the public and report to their superiors in the hierarchy ahead of tangible student benefit and improved student learning.

    Let’s help the students in the schools by learning to ask this question: “Thanks so much for those numbers / scores / rankings. Now what can you show me that will help me to understand how that translates into the quality of students’ experiences and the soundness of their learning in your schools.” If you think that question can be answered just with test scores, or with percentages of spending in the classroom, you need to spend more time on school sites talking to teachers and students.

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