Mississippi Shows That More Money Isn’t the Solution to Failing Schools​

But once we built the site, something unexpected leapt out. The tool lets you line up every school district in Mississippi and set what it spends per pupil against how its children actually perform. If the conventional wisdom were right, you would expect a clear pattern: the more a district spends, the better it does.

There is indeed a correlation between spending and outcomes, but it is the opposite kind of correlation. The higher the per-pupil spending, the worse the grades.

Higher spending, worse results

Across Mississippi’s districts, higher per-pupil spending goes hand in hand with worse outcomes, not better ones. The lowest-spending quarter of districts gets, on average, 63 percent of children to proficiency in reading and math. The highest-spending quarter manages just 36 percent. Read that again. The districts spending the most are getting barely half the results of the districts spending the least.

Ocean Springs, down on the Gulf Coast, is the top-performing district in the state — more than three-quarters of its students at proficiency — on about $10,300 per pupil. Jackson Public Schools spends $16,640 per pupil, more than 60 percent more than Ocean Springs, and gets fewer than a third of its children to proficiency. Petal spends roughly 42 percent less per pupil than Jackson — and more than doubles Jackson’s results. DeSoto County, the largest district in the state, educates nearly 34,000 children on the lowest per-pupil budget in Mississippi — and still beats Jackson almost two to one.

Our web tool also allows families to compare what their public school district spends against what the local private school down the road charges to do the very same thing — and the gap is startling. 

Jackson Public Schools spends $16,640 in public money on each child. A few minutes away, there are private schools that charge about a third of that amount. It’s the same story across the state, where typical private schools charge about $7,000 a year while often getting far better results. The public sector, it turns out, is not the cheap option. 

What matters is not how much a district spends, but how it spends it. This data in Mississippi strongly suggests that what we need to see are reforms that allow families dissatisfied with what their school board has to offer, with the option of taking their child’s share of funding to a school outside government control.

Mississippi’s own data — now in the hands of every parent at CompareMySchool.com — makes the argument that money is not the answer. Better-run schools are, and the surest way to get more of them is to trust parents to choose.

Douglas Carswell is the President & CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy. CompareMySchool.com is accessible to everyone online.

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