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Research | BEST NC launches updated ‘Per Pupil Expenditure Data Explorer’

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Gina Resendez, a kindergarten teacher at Eastern Elementary in Beaufort County, works with a student on the first day of the 2023-24 school year. Katie Dukes/EducationNC.

BEST NC is pleased to announce the update of its Per Pupil Expenditure (PPE) Data Explorer and landing page, designed to facilitate the understanding and exploration of North Carolina’s school-level spending data and its relationship to other key education indicators. The updated tool features school-level and district-level expenditure data from the 2018-19 through 2021-22 school years, including both traditional public schools and charter schools.

By comparing schools with similar characteristics, school leaders and other education stakeholders can identify schools with strong student performance at varying levels of funding and/or relative to the characteristics of their student body. Promising or innovative practices from these schools might then be examined to help improve teaching and learning in similar schools.

For example, users can narrow the analysis to include all elementary schools where at least 60% of students qualify as economically disadvantaged, and then examine schools with strong student growth numbers and modest per pupil expenditures.

Users can then hover over any school to see a display of data pertaining to that school.

With the release of school-level expenditure data, and with the help of BEST NC’s Per Pupil Expenditure Data Explorer, North Carolinians can explore trends in school spending at the school level, instead of being limited to district-level metrics. Several insights are highlighted on the PPE landing page. Here is one example:

For more information about the PPE Tool, including important trends derived from the data, please see our blog accompanying this tool’s release.