"Deficit" district
It's interesting that a story that deals with the financial crunch faced by a particular school district contains absolutely no information about how the district's students perform academically.
And the only stick that KDE can really wave in front of schools is the idea of a "state takeover" for financial mismanagement. Abysmal student academic performance, at least in this case, is not a sufficient pretext for taking over a school.
Luckily, Dick Innes has looked at how well schools perform academically per dollar spent to do it. Ludlow High School ranks near the bottom for student performance on the ACT per dollar spent, even after you control for poverty (% of students in free/reduced lunch programs).
It means that the vast majority of high schools get more performance on the ACT per dollar than Ludlow does.
