New Education Funding Dashboard provides spending transparency, comparisons between SC school districts

COLUMBIA, SC (WOLO) — At the SC State House Wednesday afternoon, state officials announced the rollout of a new Education Funding Dashboard.

Governor Henry McMaster along with SC Superintendent of Education Ellen Weaver, and representatives from the SC Revenue and Fiscal Affairs Office unveiled the new dashboard — which shows data and allows for comparisons across districts within the state.

Frank Rainwater, Executive Director of the SC RFA Office, says the dashboard currently shows data from the 2021-2022 school year at a district level with the hope to eventually show data at the school level.

“We hope this tool makes education funding data and information more accessible to both policy makers and the public to further support informed decision making,” Rainwater says.

Included in the dashboard are statistics on per-student expenditures, the average teacher salary within each district, the average number of students per teacher, and student assessment comparisons in both Math and English.

Representatives says the dashboard will bring more transparency and accountability.

“This is going to be such an important step forward in helping us explain to parents, to the public, to interested citizens, how their hard earned dollars are being spent to deliver real results for our students,” says SC Superintendent of Education Ellen Weaver.

The dashboard also allows users to view expenditures on instructional support within a district, and to see if any correlations can be made between topics — like the rate of poverty in a district versus assessment scores.

“Oftentimes it can be tempting to use data as a weapon, instead of as a tool, and I want to stress that in the conversations that I have with educators all across the state, whether we’re talking about a financial dashboard like this, or whether we are talking about state report cards, that this is a way to understand where we are so we know how to get to where we need to go,” says Weaver.

Click here to visit SC RFA’s website with the how-to guide and explanation of the dashboard, and click here for the Education Funding Dashboard.