23 February 2022

Continuous education is a core value in our organization. All Levvitate consultants have advanced education representing liberal arts, education, medical and STEM education. Recently, we held a lunchtime discussion on the importance of K-12 education in laying the foundation for advanced vocational, technical and higher educational studies. During that discussion, we questioned how the U.S. compares with other countries in the amount of funds are allocated to educate our students and how the funding has changed to adapt to the changing global environment, and specifically with respect to STEM education since we are mostly a STEM company.

Recognizing that it is a rather loaded research question, the objective was modified to simply capture general information on the topic, rather than performing a full analysis and report.

In the Internet search, one of the results in the Bing search list was the IES NCES Center for Education Statistics. According to the website, "the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) is the primary federal entity for collecting and analyzing data related to education in the U.S. and other nations. NCES is located within the U.S. Department of Education and the Institute of Education Sciences." Their data shows that for K-12 education, the United States ranks fourth, after Luxembourg, Austria and Norway in the increase of education dollars over a period of seven years. This gave us our general answer of how much is spent and also the changes, sparing us some calculation time.

As is customary when any analysis project is undertaken, whether brief or extended, there are always additional questions. In this case, we wanted to look closer to home at operational expenditures for STEM education.

In Ohio, there are several STEM focused K-12 institutions of various sizes. The administration reports on operational receipts and disbursements, as well non-operational disbursements. The latest data lists 2019-2021 actuals and forecasts through 2024.

Unexpectedly, the data provided to the Ohio Department of Education was not consistent across the various schools. For example, one school reports presented salaries as part of the operational disbursements, while others did not. Finding a common value or baseline for comparison was a challenge for this reason. We settled on the operational receipts variable, which for the most part captured the same data across all the schools. However, some schools charge fees and others do not.

The dashboard below displays data from four of the Ohio STEM academies, Metro Early College Bio-Med Science Academy Stem School, iSTEM Geauga Early College High School and Tri-State STEM+M Early College High School.

The most interesting pattern in the trend charts is the increase and then decrease of the operational receipts for the Tri-State STEM+M school. Looking closely at the data, there was a sharp decline in the operational receipts category Other (1830, 1840, 1850, 1860, 1870, 1890).

Looking at the comparison of operational receipts for all four schools in each year, some schools had higher receipts than others, which can likely be attributed to enrollment and level of funding needs, as well as the difference in collection of fees.

This quick analysis answered our initial question, but has led us to another question: Looking further, how do the operational receipts for the other Ohio K-12 schools compare to the group of STEM schools?

Well, that is a question for another day...