While partisans rage in North Carolina over adjustments to the funding of public schools, the Cato Institute has published a report on how well the various states communicate how education dollars are spent. North Carolina received a score of 56.5/100, or an F. That is not too bad, as the state ranked 34th, and some states received F-‘s.
Foremost complaints pertain to gaps in salient per-pupil expenditure data. The state tracks per-pupil operational expenditures, but capital expenditures are anybody’s guess. In general, statistics lag and are often parsed in ways the reader cannot slice and dice for specifics. For example, summary data may not be broken up for district-wide analysis. Although the web site gets good grades for accessibility, user-friendliness is not optimal. For another example, readers doing year-by-year comparisons must do their own calculations to adjust for inflation.
Perhaps most frightening is the absence of data on pensions. Forty other states did not report education employee pensions, either.
