How to do a critical workup on a school district
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In a recent email, I asked readers for help doing critical analyses of school districts. I’ve gotten a lot of requests for this in the last few months and the list is way longer than I can handle.
A couple people actually reached out to me and said they’d help. I found myself responding with protocols to do a critical workup, writing out how I do it, and realized this would make a good newsletter post itself in case anyone out there wants to do such a thing for their district or a district of interest to them. (Shoutout to Alan Gao for inspiring the first version of this, and then applying the protocols to great effect!)
Below is more or less how I go about looking into districts. One of the people I talked to called it a “critical workup.” The steps below are certainly not the only way to do it and I’m sure there are a bunch of resources out there I should be consulting. It’s also not an exact science. There’s a lot of intuition, feeling, curiosity, and grasping around in the dark.
If you do happen to try this method, or have other ideas, please let me know. I need to learn more!
A method to start a critical workup on a district
1. Get a sense of the district
I do this using maps: usually NCES school district map and New America's Race/Class segregation explorer.
Find the district in these maps and get a sense of it: how many students are there, is it rural/suburban/urban, how much per pupil expenditure, mixture of local/state/federal funding, debt service per pupil, demographics, segregations, etc. Get an overall picture of this district.
2. Get the dominant narrative
Next, find out what’s being reported about the district’s finances. Read local journalism by searching for the name of the district and "budget" and "crisis" or related terms. Read some articles from the last year about the district's budget situation and get a sense of what the district leadership is saying.
Local reporting typically toes the dominant line: they ask the superintendent, school boards, and maybe a parent or two about the situation. They rarely look at documents themselves, consult with unions, or go deep into movement analysis.
Then, to get a more fine-grained situation about the dominant narrative, specifically its cast of characters the language they use that might not be reported in the new articles, search for youtube videos of the school board and/or district giving a budget presentation from sometime in the last six months. Look for the district name and “budget.” Watch the most recent video and see what comes out. I do this aesthetically, politically, ideologically, and technically, watching/listening for the texture of voices, faces, names, etc.
Try to suss out who's pushing what kind of line, where the tension might be. Look people up on LinkedIn. Also, pay close attention to the slide presentations and the stuff that the person presenting rushes through. They typically don’t want you to focus on that stuff, but it can be some of the most important.
3. Try to construct questions for a counter-narrative
This is the hardest part, where you have to go into the forest and see what you can make of the tangle of finances in documents that are publicly available. The goal is to find fodder for a counter-narrative.
There’s two steps to take here.
Find the district on emma.msrb.org. This can be difficult because districts list themselves uniquely on EMMA, it might take a minute to figure out where the district is.
When you find the district’s page, look at two documents. First, find most recent audited financial statements. Then find their most recent bond statement. For how to do this, check out this video at minute 54:30 where I give a little explanation—I share my screen and do it myself.
Don’t get intimidated by the documents. Take a deep breath. Look around and see what you see, see what you think of it, see what you make of it. Some tips: look at revenues and expenditures. See what numbers are big and small, where they go up and down in large amounts from year to year. CRTL+F things like “debt service” and “mill rate” and “assessed property value” and see what comes up. Track trends.
For the bond statement, check out the credit rating, interest rates, private banks doing consulting, the “Purpose and Use of Bonds” section, the “costs of issuance.” Read the district’s description of itself, its biggest employers. See what jumps out at you, what looks interesting, and take note. The big questions What aren't the district leaders saying?
After I do all this, I usually write something up, finding a thread/narrative in what I’ve found, contrasting the dominant line with the potentials for an insurgent line.
Give it a try!