Kansas State Department of Education makes available tables of the number of employees working in Kansas schools. Employees are classified in two broad categories, Certified and Non-Certified. Within each category, employees are further classified by job type such as Superintendent, Curriculum Specialist, and Social Worker.
Visualization of certified employees, showing Principals and Curriculum Specialists highlighted.I’ve gathered the tables back to fiscal year 2002 (the 2001 – 2002 school year) and present them in an interactive visualization. There are separate visualizations for Certified and Non-Certified employees. In each, as shown in the instruction, you may check the check boxes to add or remove types of employees. For the employee types that are shown, you may click to highlight types apart from the others.
The line charts show the relative change in the number of employees. You may learn whether the number of employee type A is growing faster or slower than employee type B.
The visualization also holds tables showing the number of employees.
Click here to open the visualization in a new window.
Reactions to the release of National Assessment of Educational Progress scores for Kansas and the nation. Also, an interactive visualization.
Results for the 2015 administration of the National Assessment of Educational Progress became available October 28. The test, sometimes called the “nation’s report card,” is described as “the largest nationally representative and continuing assessment of what America’s students know and can do in various subject areas.”
The Wichita Eagle didn’t have much to say on this, reporting “Results from the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress show that Kansas scores dropped in most areas since 2013, state education officials announced Wednesday. The decreases echo a downward trend in scores nationwide on the NAEP exam, also known as the Nation’s Report Card.”
The Kansas State Department of Education reported “Results from the 2015 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) exams, also known as the Nation’s Report Card, show that Kansas followed the national trend of decreasing scores. Across the nation this year, both fourth- and eighth-grade mathematic scores, as well as eighth-grade reading scores, are lower in 2015 than in 2013. Fourth-grade reading scores aren’t significantly different from 2013.”
The Lawrence Journal-Worldused the Associated Press story: “Kansas schoolchildren are faring worse on a test known as the nation’s report card. The state’s performance dip follows a national trend of falling scores on the National Assessment of Educational progress.” So too did the Topeka Capital-Journal.
The Kansas Association of School Boards noted “State and national education leaders, including KASB, are currently researching the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress scores, which were released earlier this week. Both nationally and in Kansas the 2015 NAEP results decreased slightly. … While Kansas results decreased slightly, Kansas student achievement remained above the national average in 4th- and 8th grade math and 8th grade reading and was the same as the national average in 4th grade reading. KASB is currently doing an in-depth analysis of the NAEP results and release its findings as soon as possible.”
Kansas Governor Sam Brownback issued a statement: “Today’s NAEP scores reflect the need for real education reform to benefit our students. This is a complex issue with no single cause or solution and today’s results confirm a trend showing that even though education funding has increased by more than $1 billion over the past decade, NAEP scores have remained largely flat. … While our Kansas schools remain above the national average, we can and should do more. We want our students to excel and have the skills they need to succeed in school and life in the 21st century. To do that, we must work to get more dollars into the classroom and into the infrastructure our teachers need to improve student performance, particularly in math. We need flexibility at the local level to address students’ needs, and we should support the great efforts of the thousands of teachers who work every day to help give our students opportunity for a brighter future.”
Some of these statements compared Kansas scores to the national average. That is not appropriate if there are subgroups that score at different levels, and if the composition of these subgroups varies significantly between states or the national average. That is the case with Kansas, which has significantly lower minority populations than the nation and some states. Care must be used when making comparisons.
To assist in understanding NAEP scores, I’ve updated two interactive visualizations with 2015 data. One visualization shows subgroups based on race/ethnicity, and the other shows subgroups based on national school lunch program eligibility, which is a commonly-used surrogate for income.
Each visualization has a number of tabs that display data in different ways. Most tabs allow for filtering of data in several ways.
An interactive visualization of data provided to members of the Kansas 2015 Special Committee on K-12 Student Success.
The Kansas 2015 Special Committee on K-12 Student Success held its first meeting on October 23. As part of the meeting, data on school spending was made available. Of particular interest may be the data on instruction spending.
Dale M. Dennis, Deputy Commissioner of Education, provided committee members these definitions of instruction spending categories:
Instruction — Includes the activities dealing directly with the interaction between teachers and students. This catgory [sic] includes only regular and part-time teachers, teacher aides or assistants, homebound teachers, hospital-based teachers, substitute teachers, and teachers on sabbatical leave.
Student Support Services — Includes the following services: attendance and social work, guidance, health, psychological, speech pathology and audiology.
Instructional Support Services — Includes the following services: improvement of instruction, library and media, instruction-related technology, and academic student assessment.
Example table from visualization.Committee members were supplied with spreadsheets holding one year’s spending. I’ve gathered the spreadsheets for the three years that were provided and present them in one interactive visualization. One view of the data shows the data items for each school district, with the three years shown together. I added amount per pupil calculations.
Example from visualization.A second view shows the per-pupil values as a line graph over the three years.
This spending data represents Kansas state support only and does not include spending from federal or local funding sources. The provided data was not adjusted for inflation.
Click here to open the visualization in a new window. Visualization created using Tableau Public.
Part of the difficulty in understanding and debating school spending in Kansas is the starting point, that is, the lack of factual information. From 2012, a look at a survey that revealed the level of knowledge of school spending by Kansans.
When asked about the level of spending on public schools in Kansas, citizens are generally uninformed or misinformed. They also incorrectly thought that spending has declined in recent years.
These are some of the findings of a survey commissioned by Kansas Policy Institute and conducted by SurveyUSA, a national opinion research firm.
In a press release, KPI president Dave Trabert said “As Kansans consider how to deal with the potential fallout from another school lawsuit, pressure to expand Medicaid, ballooning pension deficits and concerns about rising property taxes, we wanted to check again to see how perceptions of the facts influences opinions. Good information is essential to informed opinions and it is clear that when given the facts, Kansans offer much different responses than what is typically reported from overly-simplistic public surveys.”
Here’s the first question of the survey, asking about Kansas state spending on schools: “How much state funding do you think Kansas school districts currently receive per pupil each year from JUST the state of Kansas? Less than $4,000 per pupil? Between $4,000 and $5,000? Between $5,000 and $6,000? Or more than $6,000 per pupil?”
The correct answer is the last category, according to Kansas State Department of Education. State spending on Kansas schools, on a per-pupil basis, is $6,984 for the most recent school year. That’s total state-funded spending of $3,184,163,559 divided by 456,000.50 full time equivalent students. 13 percent of survey respondents chose the correct category. 44 percent thought the correct answer was less than $4,000.
Opposing teacher merit pay based on fairness issues isn’t being fair to students. Instead, it’s cruel to students.
A letter to the Wichita Eagle states “I think it is impossible to develop a fair merit pay plan for education.” Reading the letter, it is clear that the writer is concerned about fair to teachers. Instead, we ought to be concerned about what is fair to students.
There is much research showing the link between good teachers and learning. Most studies show that teacher effectiveness is the most important thing under the control of schools, and far more important than class size. Paying effective teachers well is important for retaining the best teachers. But even more important: If teachers can be paid based on their effectiveness, that will provide a signal to bad teachers that they should either work to improve their skills, or leave teaching.
Is it overly cruel and harsh to say there are some teachers so bad that they should ushered out of the profession? It depends on who is most important: Teachers, or students?
Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half’s worth of material. That difference amounts to a year’s worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a “bad” school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects. You’d have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you’d get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile. And remember that a good teacher costs as much as an average one, whereas halving class size would require that you build twice as many classrooms and hire twice as many teachers.
Gladwell’s article speaks as to how teachers can be evaluated so we can find the best and the worst. That’s important, because if we retain the worst teachers and pay them the same as the best teachers, we aren’t being fair to students.
There is an update with data for a new year; click here.
Kansas school fund balances rose slightly this year, both in absolute dollars and dollars per pupil.
As Kansans debate school funding, as the Kansas Supreme Court considers ordering more school spending, and as school spending boosters insisting that school spending has been slashed, a fact remains constant: Kansas schools don’t spend all the money they’ve been given. Fund balances have been growing almost every year, including this year.
Fund balances are necessary for cash flow management. The issue is what levels of balances are necessary. Based on recent data from the Kansas State Department of Education, fund balances rose rapidly after 2008, and have remained largely level since 2011.
I’ve gathered data about unspent Kansas school funds and presented it as an interactive visualization. You may explore the data yourself by using the visualization. Click here to open the visualization in a new window. Data is from Kansas State Department of Education. Visualization created using Tableau Public.
Example from Kansas school fund balances visualization.
In a pitch to increase membership, United Teachers of Wichita promotes an exclusive benefit: “Only UTW members receive a copy of the Teachers Employment Agreement (contract).”
I don’t know why the Wichita teachers union would promote the contract as an exclusive benefit. It is a public document. You may read it here.
USD 259, the Wichita public school district, makes its monthly checkbook register available. I’ve gathered the monthly spreadsheets made the consolidated available for analysis through Tableau Public.
The workbook (click here to open it in a new window) has a number of tabs, each showing the same data organized and summarized in a different way.
There are some caveats. First, not all school district spending is in this database. For each year, the total of the checks is in the neighborhood of $350 million, while the total spending for USD 259 is over $600 million. So there’s spending that isn’t included in this checkbook data.
Second, there are suppliers such as “Commerce Bank Visa BusinessCard.” Payments made to this supplier are over $7 million per year. These payments from the district’s checkbook undoubtedly pay a credit card bill, and this alone doesn’t let us know what the $7 million was spent on.
There are some data quality issues, as seen nearby.
USD 259 supplies this advice with this data: “The information you find may cause you to ask more questions. If so, the person to contact is Wichita Public School’s Controller, Barbara Phillips. She can be reached at (316) 973-4628, or at bphillips@usd259.net.”
There are some data quality issues, as seen nearby.