In her 2015 book The Prize, Dale Russakoff tells the story of how Facebook-chairman Mark Zuckerberg's $100 million donation to Newark schools was spent. The bottom line: in the absence of a clear plan for how to use the money to meaningfully improve student outcomes, the infusion of cash to the public school system was largely unsuccessful.

When discussing her research on NPR’s Fresh Air, Ms. Russakoff summed up one of the issues she observed this way:

The district schools have a lot of legacy costs, and...there needs to be some kind of - almost a forensic accounting of where the money in the central office of the school district is going so that more of it gets to the classroom.

Jonathan Knee, a professor at Columbia Business School writing for the New York Times, put it like this:

Ms. Russakoff provides nuanced portraits of flawed but largely well-meaning human beings…..In family court, judges are required to apply the “best interest of the child” standard….

No such rule, unfortunately, constrains politicians, unions, administrators or even parents when it comes to the organization and operation of public education. “The Prize” serves as an invaluable reminder of both how far from this standard we have strayed in determining how we educate our children and how much more than good intentions are required to meet it.

Over the past 10 years, Durham taxpayers have more than insulated Durham Public Schools from the effects of state cuts to education with very strong local funding from property tax.

In 2006, the DPS budget was $290 million. Last year it was just over $400 million. Adjusting for inflation, $290 million in 2006 is equivalent to $341 million today.

• In constant dollars, the budget was $59 million more in 2015 than it was ten years ago.
  In 2015, $16 million in local funding flowed out of DPS following students who elected to attend charter schools. Accounting for inflation, this is $11 million more than was sent to charters in 2006.
• Adjusting for this increase, DPS currently has $48 million more to spend on its own operations than it had ten years ago.

In its Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR), DPS documents its revenues and expenditures along with several key metrics about the district’s operations, including the number of students it serves and the number of teachers it employs. As shown above, table 17 of last year’s CAFR tells an alarming story about the relationship between the budget, the number of students, and the number of teachers over the past ten years. Despite serving an additional 2,300 students and having an additional $48 million to spend on their educations, DPS actually employs fewer teachers now than it did a decade ago.

In the hierarchy of spending priorities, we are not aware of any major policy initiative implemented in the past ten years that would be ahead of hiring enough teachers to keep pace with student enrollment growth.

DPS had the money to do that and much more, but it doesn’t appear that this happened.

To actually move the needle on academic performance, research provides a short-list of strategies DPS could implement with that much additional funding:

• Hire more K-5 teachers for at-risk students. $48 million could pay for the annual services of 800 teachers (at the current approximate average salary plus benefits cost of $60,000 per FTE). That would lower the current student-teacher ratio from 14.3 to 10.7.
• Extend the school day and/or school year for the 18,000+ students in DPS currently testing below grade level. The cost of this would vary depending on implementation; DPS has not publicly disclosed any research into this strategy as far as we know.
• Provide universal, high-quality Pre-K for 3 and 4-year-olds. DPS estimates a 1-year universal Pre-K program would cost the district an additional $19 million.
• Bring Durham teacher salaries up to the national average to attract the very best and brightest teachers in North Carolina to Durham. In a recent budget advisory committee meeting, DPS finance officials estimated this would cost around $30 million.

While many on the school board claim that DPS is doing more and more with fewer resources each year, their records indicate otherwise.

With an election on the horizon -- including both the school board that proposes DPS’ budget, and the Board of County Commissioners that’s the final arbiter of local supplemental school spending -- it’s a crucial time for Durhamites to ask these questions of elected officials, system staff and those candidates who seek to serve on two downtown daises.

We don’t doubt that the individuals in these roles are clearly very dedicated and well-intentioned. To that end, it would be interesting to understand more about the changes in DPS’ spending, given the apparent lacuna around schools spending.

Ultimately, more than good intentions are required to actually improve student outcomes. Elected boards and their staffs must possess the financial and managerial wherewithal to translate their priorities into actionable strategies and to follow through with implementation.

This issue is not unique to DPS; in fact it plagues local governments and other organizations nationwide. But that does not mean that Durham should not work to overcome it.