Expanded Features - Linkage to finance data

Collecting consistent and accurate financial data at the individual school-, staff-, and program-levels can be challenging, but success is key to understanding the relationship between expenditures and student achievement. "Creating a comprehensive data system that links longitudinal student outcome data to financial data at the district level—and ultimately, the school or even classroom levels—can help decisionmakers understand not only what works but also what it takes to deliver what works." (Gazerro 2008) More specifically, "a high-quality financial system that is connected to longitudinal student data supports student learning in a number of fundamental ways:

• facilitating the identification of resource-effective strategies and schools;
• providing insight into the most productive ways to structure districts, schools, and classrooms to support student outcomes; and
• increasing transparency for education stakeholders at all levels to ensure that increasingly scarce resources are spent in the most efficient and effective way." (Gazerro 2008)