Descriptive Evidence on the Relationship Between School Board Training and Financial Deliberations

Education resources matter when they are allocated and used effectively. Yet, the upstream decisions school boards make about district budgets and resource allocation are understudied. In this descriptive study, we analyze data from 400 publicly available video recordings of financial deliberations in school board budget meetings between spring 2022 and spring 2023. Half of the video recordings are from school boards that received education finance training from the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University. We find school boards discussed student outcomes in only 15-25% of board meetings focused on financial deliberations. Only about 11% of the variation in financial deliberations can be explained by district characteristics, student achievement, and community characteristics. We find no differences in the discussion of student outcomes for districts with and without the Edunomics training. However, descriptive evidence suggests a positive relationship between the Edunomics training and some summary measures of financial deliberations: the overall level of engagement in budgetary discussions; the likelihood per-unit cost and internal barriers (such as decision-making structure) were mentioned; and the likelihood that the budget was linked to outcomes. These findings underscore the variation in school board deliberations and suggest the potential value of training school board members to influence those deliberations.