Too many Kentucky schools shooting blanks

By Jim Waters

By looking at issues from different angles, intellectually honest people often reach a variety of legitimate conclusions. However, there are times when truth emerges no matter the perspective. Such is the case when it comes to the impact of money on the performance of the commonwealth's schools.

From every angle, the oft-repeated assertion that funding causes improvement in the classroom especially among poor and disadvantaged students simply isn't true.

A new Bluegrass Institute analysis Bang for the Buck: How cost effective are Kentucky's public schools? offers the first-ever evaluation of how efficiently our state's schools are performing, based on per-pupil spending versus performance on the Commonwealth Accountability Testing System (CATS) and ACT college-entrance exams.

Based on a Score-Spending Index (SSI), this new report concludes that Kentucky taxpayers often get little or no "bang" for their education "bucks." Consider some of the following surprising, but statistically unassailable, conclusions offered by this report:

Many schools achieve solid academic results with surprisingly low amounts of funding.

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