Yesterday, Governor Easley announced that UNC-CH will receive a $300,000 grant to audit high school expenditures in all 115 school districts. The goal is to find a relationship between spending and student performance.
I doubt that the audit results will yield any new or useful information. Studies that attempt to find a link between spending and student performance usually find a weak or inconsistent relationship between the two. Regardless of this, the audit will be used to justify additional spending. What is truly curious about the audit is that both Easley and Judge Manning have crowned the New Schools Project (NSP) as the savior of low performing schools. Perhaps the audit is another push for NSP funding.
