Education Week - August 21, 2019 - 15

every dollar to go to the classroom,"
he said. "And so do I. That's why I
think there should be greater transparency to make sure that that is actually happening."

Making Data Available
A substantial amount of research
has shown in recent years that how
districts spend money can dramatically impact academic outcomes.
Federal officials, through the Every
Student Succeeds Act, and state legislatures have begun to impose new requirements ramping up the amount of
fiscal data local school officials must
display to the public.
McCuskey, a lawyer by background,
said that voting on the state's education budget was especially frustrating
during his four years as a state legislator since the education department
provided outdated, infrequent, and
incomplete expenditure data. He said
it was difficult to figure out what budgetary changes the state needed to
make to improve academic outcomes.
"One of the things that was most
striking to me was the insane lack of
information we had in order to make
decisions," said McCuskey.
After he successfully campaigned
to be the state's auditor in 2016, he
contracted with "OpenGov," a private vendor, to build a website that
shows in real time every transaction
West Virginia's local and state officials
make and the salaries of thousands of
employees.
Today, that website, which cost the
state $271,000 to create, is used by

ing 9th grade with a 2.0 GPA, that
degree of improvement would reduce
the number of students who ended the
year off-track for high school graduation by 5.3 percentage points.

Peer Support Is Critical
Moreover, while high-performing
students who received the mindset instruction saw no boost to their grades,
both low- and high-performing students were more likely to enroll in advanced or honors math courses in 10th
grade if they had participated in the
growth mindset sessions.
"I suspect that higher-performing
kids are somewhat buffered from the
GPA effects of the intervention because they already have a relatively
high GPA-you might have some
kind of ceiling effect," Hostetter said.
"But I do think that one of the higherachieving student profiles is the kid
who wants to get higher grades but
doesn't necessarily want to enroll in
harder classes, for fear of not being
able to achieve those higher grades,"
Hostetter said. "I think that one of the
things that the growth mindset intervention likely does for those students,
is to plant the seed that it's not so much
about the grades as it is about the challenge-and engaging in challengeseeking behavior in an academic setting is a positive thing to do."
Other students play a role as well.
Students in both the control and mindset groups filled out surveys on their

journalists, research groups, and think
tanks to make recommendations on
government spending. Last year the
state was lauded by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, an advocacy
organization for having the nation's
most usable online fiscal transparency
websites.
"When you have a state that's struggling like West Virginia, the status quo
is always the enemy," said McCuskey,
who also runs a fraud unit and conducts audits of local governments. "I
believe that in order to move this state
in a positive direction, people have to
have access to the government."

Demanding Transparency
West Virginia's budgetary woes
have been in the national spotlight
ever since the state's entire teaching
force last year went on strike to protest
stagnant pay, decrepit schools, and a
massive teacher shortage.
Pauls, the Brooke County school
board member, said taxpayers in his
district would be more trusting of
school officials if they had a better
understanding of how money is spent.
When McCuskey came to speak to
his school board in February, the superintendent had just a month earlier
resigned after, among other things,
administrators received more than
$144,000 in pay raises even as the
district laid off 40 teachers and closed
three schools.
Currently, Pauls said, residents have
to either scan the district's monthly
board books to figure out how the
district spends its money, make open

beliefs about intelligence, but also
performed a test that gauged their
willingness to seek out challenging
tasks. Yeager and his team found that
schools where student norms supported growth mindsets had stronger
effects from the online intervention
than those with more fixed-mindset
students.
"Ninth grade is a time when the adolescent concern for appearing dumber
than their classmates is heightened,"
Yeager said. "In an unsupportive
school, the treatments fade out. It's
like planting a seed in untilled soil; it
can't grow. ... No individual treatment
can compensate fully for peer climate."
The experiment is part of the National Study of Learning Mindsets,
an interdisciplinary project spanning
more than a dozen universities and
research groups nationwide. The project is making the online intervention
materials free to schools; opening its
dataset to other researchers for additional studies; and connecting the
schools in the study into an ongoing
professional development network.
Yeager said he hopes to expand his
work to study how teacher mindset
beliefs and practices can support students' academic mindsets.
Coverage of social and emotional
learning is supported in part by
a grant from the NoVo Foundation,
at www.novofoundation.org.
Education Week retains sole editorial
control over the content of this coverage.

records requests, or stop by the district's central office to collect copies
of district receipts.
In recent months, Pauls has badgered district administrators about
where all the parking fee money they
collect from high school students goes,
and for details on what administrators meant when they said the district
made 300 purchases through Amazon.
"There's so much room for indiscretion," he said. "I'm not saying that
fraud is happening, but, I'm saying,
let's be transparent here."
Blaine Hess, the superintendent
of Jackson County schools and the
president of the state's association of
school administrators, said districts
try to be as open with the public as
possible through their budget books,

board meetings, and annual audits.
He points out that helping the public
understand where schools' money
comes from can be confusing since
it's distributed through complicated
funding formulas from three levels of
government: local, state, and federal.
Hess worries that any extra work
heaped on his already-stretched finance department would be difficult
to get done. The equivalent of 3 ½
people, he said, work in the department, which is charged with, among
other things, payroll, benefits, accounts, and complying with a slew of
federal and state laws.
"Our office is working at capacity
currently," he said. "We don't want to
be in a place where we have to employ
an additional person."

RHB 206, a controversial and
broad-reaching bill, says no modifications can be made to the state's
information system in order to comply with the state auditor's requests.
Stewart, with the state's department
of education, said after browsing the
checkbook website that she thinks the
system will be able to provide much of
what the auditor's team asks for.
McCuskey said he plans to have
much of the data available for politicians by the start of next year's legislative session in January and available
to the public by the end of next year.
"The technology now is at a place
where doing this stuff is no longer
hard," McCuskey said. "It's a matter
of finding someone who's willing to
stand up and do it."

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Education Week - August 21, 2019

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