Philadelphia School District Spending Delivers Well With Few $$

Whatever one thinks of the Philadelphia School District’s spending habits and educational results, there is evidence it produces unusually good bang per buck.

School spending in Philadelphia is the ninth most-efficient of major cities in the United States, WalletHub, an online financial-information medium, reported today.

WalletHub Communications Mgr. Raz Daraban explained, “WalletHub divided each city’s aggregated standardized test scores in reading and math for grades 4 and 8 by its total education spending per capita. We then normalized the data by four key socioeconomic indicators.”

Those are poverty rate, median household income, children in single-parent families and households where English is not their first language. All these factors are known to affect school performance, given equal school budgets; therefore schools with high numbers in these areas need greater spending to match the scores of schools with low numbers. Cities vary widely in these variables, so their tests scores should not be compared directly.

The 10 most-efficient cities in WalletHub’s report – delivering the best test results per dollar spent, when socioeconomic challenges are weighed in – are:

1 ) Miami, Fla.; 2 ) Grand Rapids, Mich.; 3 ) Richmond, Va.; 4 ) Mobile, Ala.; 5 ) Tucson, Ariz.; 6 ) Detroit, Mich.; 7 ) Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; 8 ) Austin, Tex.; 9 ) Philadelphia, Pa.; 10 ) Birmingham, Ala.

WalletHub is a social network created by Evolution Finance, Inc. as an online source for financial information.