Hard Data for Hard Decisions: 3 Strategies To Understand & Maximize Your Return On Instruction

As a district leader or school board member, you’ve always focused on ensuring your budget is being spent on those programs and tools that most effectively move the needle on student achievement.

The business world calls this measurement return on investment (ROI), a straightforward ratio of profit to cost. We educators better understand ROI as the return on instruction. While the bottom line is important, just as important is the positive impact that investments have on student achievement. And this is why educational ROI (eROI) is much more nuanced and challenging to calculate. 

Yet in today’s shifting landscape of educational funding, you need to know the eROI of all your district’s programs and tools more than ever. By understanding empirically which investments have the greatest impact on student success, you can face hard decisions about budgeting with more confidence.

Let’s unpack three practices necessary to calculate your eROI, and how you can put them to use in preparation for the 2025–2026 school year and beyond.

1. Build a cross-functional team to bridge gaps in expertise

Federal program managers, instructional coaches, and facilities directors—what do these district roles have in common? Regardless of their proximity to classroom learning, they all contribute to student success. Each department in the district holds key expertise necessary to understand the effectiveness of your investments in learning, and not just those programs or tools used in the classroom. 

Yet how often do you see financially-focused departments engage with the academically-focused teams, and vice versa? 

Your first practice is to build a cross-functional team to ensure fiscal responsibility for student growth. This team should bring together experts from across the district with the goal of understanding how funded programs, tools, and resources drive student academic growth. 

Why is this essential? Leta Dietz Smith, Title I and ESSER Grant Manager for Lee County School District in Florida, put it well in our recent webinar about measuring eROI:

“We have to empower our finance people to start making decisions that impact education, and we also need to empower our educators to make effective decisions that financially impact the district.”

Merging these voices into a team helps you (and more importantly, your students) get the most learning impact out of your district investments.

Recommendations

• Clarify which team(s) are responsible for conversations about eROI. Where are these discussions happening? How often? What data or resources do these teams use to inform decisions about instructional practices? 
• Think outside the box as you craft this team. Even procurement officers offer important insights into school and district-level spending. Leave no stone unturned when considering which voices need to contribute to these discussions.  
• Get a regularly scheduled meeting on the team’s calendar to measure your eROI across programs and tools. A monthly cadence is a great starting point, but adjust the timing as best suits your district’s needs and the availability of your impact data (more on this in a moment). 

Key Takeaway: Every department in the district, from operations to curriculum, contributes to student achievement in some capacity. By bringing these experts together, you can hold more meaningful, multi-faceted conversations about how to spend your dollars to produce the greatest academic impact.

Watch our recent webinar to learn how Lee County School District uncovered its eROI with Level Data.

2. Develop a common language around eROI

In addition to having a multi-faceted team, you also need to cultivate a shared understanding of what eROI means and looks like in your district. This exercise may feel challenging at first, but a shared language is foundational to cross-examine funding and student outcomes together, rather than in isolation. With time and practice, additional clarity and collective efficacy will follow. 

Ask the right questions about your investments

With both financial and academic experts in the room, examine your current financial landscape. Identify which programs receive funding from which sources, and how both align with district strategic priorities. It helps to start investigating with one program or programs tied to one funding source. 

Let’s use an example: Imagine your district is reviewing a high-cost literacy tutoring service implemented across elementary schools. Its purpose is to improve reading outcomes, which have declined since the pandemic. 

Financial questions may include:

• What is the overall cost of the program? Per pupil? Per school campus?
• How are we paying for this program? From which source(s) do we pull to fund it? Are any of these sources at risk of budget changes in the coming school year?
• What adjacent, similar programs did we purchase to counter declining reading scores? 

Academic questions may include:

• How many students are enrolled in the tutoring program overall? By campus? By grade level?
• How many students use the program? How frequently? At what dosage on average?
• With how much fidelity are schools or grade levels following vendor recommendations for tutoring services? 
• Which assessments should we review to understand program impact? What do those assessment scores look like for students who use these tutoring services? What variation in scores do we see based on variation in students’ use of the tutoring program?

Each of these inquiries and more will converge into the ultimate question: Does this tutoring program impact student reading outcomes? More importantly, in what ways does it or does it not impact learning?

Asking in-depth questions encourages your team to develop a common way to talk about instructional costs and academic impact together. 

Standardize the right data across programs

To answer questions about a program’s efficacy, you also need data. But understanding which metrics matter when measuring eROI can be tricky for two reasons:

1. Programs often use a wide variety of metrics to track their implementation and impact.
2. Financial decisions about programs tend to lean on high-level trends and/or simplified metrics of usage, such as login rates.

Recommendations

• Use one program or funding stream to build a shared language about eROI. Allow experts to share their knowledge with one another to strengthen shared understanding and deepen your lines of questioning. 
• Clarify and map usage metrics (especially ones difficult to understand) for eROI back to specific programs, tools, and associated funding streams. Compile them into a glossary for reference.
• Bring your metrics under one roof to ensure the district has clean, quantitative data and incremental reporting on that data to aid with decision making. Make sure the team understands how often impact data sources become available (such as interim assessments vs. summative assessments, etc).

Key Takeaway: Informed decisions rely on shared language and clear metrics. By collectively asking questions as a team about your programs and products—and looking beyond the first layer of data—you better understand your financial and instructional landscape and build a consistent approach to quantifying your eROI. Our new eROI toolkit, “ROI in Action: A Practical Toolkit to Evaluate the Effectiveness of Your Strategic Plan” has a template your team can use to start the conversation.

3. Use eROI to align district stakeholders and priorities

Beyond standardizing language about programs and costs, eROI is an essential resource to track progress on strategic goals and engage stakeholders as you make financial decisions. 

With your glossary of metrics on hand, review your district’s strategic plan. Map each goal and priority back to relevant programs, their costs, and key usage data, to determine their eROI. This exercise will illuminate where your district is succeeding in its mission and where opportunities for improvement lie. From there, you can communicate with key stakeholders about changes to programs or long-term funding plans that will maximize eROI. 

Let’s illustrate this step with our tutoring service example. You can discuss eROI when advocating for this program to your school board, highlighting how it directly impacts your district’s strategic goals by increasing student literacy achievement. eROI can also help the board understand progress made thus far, as well as how to maximize this investment further by ensuring students receive services as recommended by the vendor. 

Sharing eROI can also build trust and honor financial transparency with the broader community. Emphasize to families that the district uses taxpayer dollars responsibly by putting them toward a service with demonstrated impact on reading outcomes. Explain to school leaders and teachers why following vendor recommendations for this tutoring program is essential, as it correlates with improved literacy outcomes.

District and school spending is under deeper scrutiny than ever. By understanding your eROI, you have the opportunity to bring the entire school community together to drive student excellence on a limited budget. 

Recommendations

• For each priority in your district’s strategic plan, clearly detail which programs and associated costs will support its achievement, using your shared usage metrics and eROI. 
• Adapt the narrative about eROI to your audience. For example, parents do not need hard numbers around achievement, but they value understanding how your district’s evaluation processes hold it accountable for spending taxpayer dollars responsibly. 
• Consider how specific programs and tools best complement Tier 1 instruction, and under what conditions. Communicate these reflections and accompanying data with building leaders and teachers to help them accelerate learning further.

Key Takeaway: Shared language and clear metrics around eROI are the crux of tracking and achieving your district’s strategic priorities. Use them to align strategic goals, budgets, and stakeholders, ensuring your funds go toward programs and resources that truly drive student learning forward year after year. 

Maximize Your Return On Instruction With Level Data

Even in these uncertain times, your district can make sound financial decisions about programs, tools, and other investments to ensure students achieve. But quantifying the return on your instructional investments is much easier said than done. 

Level Data takes the guesswork out of your educational spending. With our ROI platform, you receive insights into which of your investments—from tutoring and professional learning to edtech tools—correlate with positive academic performance. Request a demo and see how ROI helps you make the greatest impact on learning with available resources.