Articles

Audit: Report On Atlanta Schools Skirts Question

Paul Donsky, AJC Staff
February 5, 2004

When the Atlanta school board decided to commission a performance assessment of the district, critics hoped the report would confirm their suspicion that the system spends too much money.

What they didn't know was that the study was conducted in a way that virtually guaranteed they wouldn't find out.

The 206-page study, released Monday, said Atlanta allocates its money wisely and the total amount the district spends is "reasonable" compared with other districts of similar size and demographic makeup.

But the two consultants who wrote the financial section of the report say they did little to assess whether Atlanta's overall level of spending is appropriate. It's much more important, they say, to look at how Atlanta is spending the money that it gets.

One of the consultants, Bruce Cooper, chairman of Fordham University's department of education administration and policy, said he has done similar studies in about 200 school systems across the country and in Canada and has never found one to be spending too much money. That's not something he looks at.

When asked whether a public school system could spend too much money, Cooper said that was "not possible."

Cooper and Denis Doyle, chief academic officer of New York-based SchoolNet, said their research addressed two central questions about Atlanta's spending habits: Is too much money being spent on the central office bureaucracy? And is Atlanta spending its money equitably -- that is, are schools in some neighborhoods getting significantly more or less money than schools in other areas?

Atlanta checked out in both cases, comparing favorably with big-city school systems like Chicago and Los Angles that Cooper has studied.

That, coupled with some encouraging academic signs, including rising test scores in the early grades, prompted the consultants to give the district a clean bill of financial health.

The report took four months and $445,000 to produce, with the school system paying roughly half that cost and private sources paying the rest.

"When you get right down to it, it's not how much you spend, it's how well you spend what you've got," said Doyle.

School system critics, who say a bloated bureaucracy and wasteful spending have made Atlanta the most expensive large district in the state, were disappointed by the study.

Glenn Delk, an Atlanta lawyer and charter school advocate, said the report skirted the big question: "Is the money being spent efficiently? Are taxpayers getting the biggest bang for the buck?"

Atlanta Superintendent Beverly Hall said the assessment team, led by Deloitte & Touche, did exactly what it was asked to do -- provide a definitive answer for critics who have said too much of Atlanta's money is spent in the central office.

The district never asked the consultants to determine whether the per-pupil spending level was appropriate.

Nationally, no one has determined how much it costs to educate low-income, urban kids in an effective way, Hall said, because no district has yet been able to do it.

Cooper and Doyle compared Atlanta's spending practices to 10 other districts -- East Baton Rouge, La.; Minneapolis; Mobile; Newark, N.J.; San Antonio; Los Angeles; Chicago; New York; Houston; and Edmonton, Canada.

Atlanta had the fourth-highest per-pupil spending among these districts, at $9,417. That was about the same as New York, far below the list-topper Newark, which spends $15,567 per-pupil, and about twice that of Mobile. The Alabama city spends $4,850 on each of its students.

Because Atlanta fell somewhere in the middle to upper-middle of the group, the consultants deemed the district's overall spending to be "reasonable," Cooper said.

Atlanta's per-pupil spending "is a robust amount of money," Cooper said. "Is it too much money? You can't argue the children don't need it."

The key finding, Cooper said, was that Atlanta spends 94 percent of its money in the schools -- on teachers, textbooks, principals, janitors and other school-level expenses.

That's as great or a greater a percentage than the big-city districts that were used for comparison.

Gary Henry, a professor of policy studies at Georgia State University, agreed that it's difficult to determine what an appropriate level of funding would be. There's a dearth of research and data required for such a study, he said.

Henry and several colleagues considered submitting a bid to conduct Atlanta's audit, but they determined that the scope was not adequate to accurately gauge whether the district was spending its money properly.

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