Miami-Dade's small elementary schools spend more per student; a median-based benchmark gap totals $20 million

Summary

Joined 2024-25 per-pupil expenditure to October enrollment for district-run schools, grouped by level and size band, and computed the excess of small elementary schools over the 500–749 median.

Data sources

• Database tablemiami_school_year_metrics

  Long-format facts: (school_number, year, metric_key, subgroup) with value, suppressed, denominator, peer and district percentiles, and the residual-z columns.

• Cached outputdata/analysis/miami-enrollment.json

  The enrollment analysis packet: trend, school change, utilization, lift table, spending versus size.

• External datasetFLDOE ESSA school per-pupil expenditures
• External datasetFLDOE Membership by District and School by Grade (Survey 2)

Steps

1. PPE and enrollment for district-run regular schools (the packet's universe).

   SELECT a.school_number, s.school_level, a.value AS ppe, b.value AS enrollment
   FROM miami_school_year_metrics a JOIN miami_school_year_metrics b USING (school_number, year) JOIN miami_schools s ON s.school_number = a.school_number
   WHERE a.metric_key = 'per_pupil_expenditure_school' AND b.metric_key = 'enrollment_oct' AND a.year = '2024-25' AND a.subgroup = 'ALL' AND b.subgroup = 'ALL'
     AND NOT a.suppressed AND NOT b.suppressed AND NOT s.is_charter AND s.school_type = 'REGULAR';

2. Medians by level and size band; the excess = Σ over elementary schools under 300 of (school PPE − 500–749 median) × school enrollment (packet ppe_vs_size.excess_cost_small_es.excess_usd); the median-gap × students reading is median_gap_times_students_usd.

Reproduce

Follow docs/cities/miami/07_runbook.md: `make miami-discover-all`, parse the PDFs, run the loaders in order, `make miami-verify`, then the analysis scripts. The queries below run directly against the local Postgres.