GPPSS Benchmark Report | Brendan P. Walsh

In light of recent Grosse Pointe community dialog I am publishing a customized version of my Michigan Benchmark product so interested parties and citizens can view raw facts and data for themselves. I will use this data in upcoming posts to share observations about the state of the Grosse Pointe Public School System.

I encourage my fellow citizens to share this data as widely as possible. I welcome any questions and suggestions for how I can help the Grosse Pointe school communities understand our financial and demographic data.

Tips for optimal viewing and interactive experience:

The Michigan Benchmark Report embedded here can be expanded and opened in its own window. The link to do so is in the lower right hand of the embedded report below.
Take notice of the drop down options on the left. Most reports are best viewed for a single year only. If a single year is not selected the report aggregates the data from the full range of years in the report.
Mousing over the charts can provide pop up views of the data. Clicking on the graphs can do the same.
The appendix in the last slides offer a view of the data models and can be instructive to understand the data. A glossary of terms is also included to explain each data element.
I have selected districts in the Wayne, Oakland, and Macomb counties that are commonly compared to the GPPSS.
All of the data in the reports up to and including fiscal year 2021 is provided by the State of Michigan on michigan.gov. Any 2022 or beyond data is sourced from the individual district’s website.

One response to “GPPSS Benchmark Report”

Mike Vethacke

June 20, 2022

This looks very good, a couple comments (maybe for future iterations).

1. I note the School of Choice slide shows kids coming INTO the system from other districts. What about a additional slide showing the converse, i.e. how many kids living in the district go to other public school districts. The numbers I’ve seen via michigan.gov show that netting those two sets of numbers explains a good portion of GPPSS’s enrollment drop.
2. I didn’t see any test score comparisons? I know there’s apples v. oranges issues with COVID disconnect and the switch to SAT from ACT, but that only affects college testing trends.
3. It’d be interesting to see debt/capital spend per pupil by district, especially if normalized by year via some sort of 3Y moving average or something. Part of the story with GPPSS is not only the operating revenue & spend per pupil…they’ve also increased borrowing which makes taxpayers cover a lot of interest expense.
4. It’d be really good to see trending by year. I say this because the full scope of issues can’t always be seen by looking at any given year…what is really problematic is GPPSS’s consistent relative underperformance stacked year over year over year. For example enrollment trend has been bad relative to state & peer average for a long time. When the BOE lets the administration focus on smaller time frames in isolation, they can just deploy whack-a-mole type excuses like “covid disruption” or “birth rate”.

Mike Vethacke

June 20, 2022

This looks very good, a couple comments (maybe for future iterations).

1. I note the School of Choice slide shows kids coming INTO the system from other districts. What about a additional slide showing the converse, i.e. how many kids living in the district go to other public school districts. The numbers I’ve seen via michigan.gov show that netting those two sets of numbers explains a good portion of GPPSS’s enrollment drop.
2. I didn’t see any test score comparisons? I know there’s apples v. oranges issues with COVID disconnect and the switch to SAT from ACT, but that only affects college testing trends.
3. It’d be interesting to see debt/capital spend per pupil by district, especially if normalized by year via some sort of 3Y moving average or something. Part of the story with GPPSS is not only the operating revenue & spend per pupil…they’ve also increased borrowing which makes taxpayers cover a lot of interest expense.
4. It’d be really good to see trending by year. I say this because the full scope of issues can’t always be seen by looking at any given year…what is really problematic is GPPSS’s consistent relative underperformance stacked year over year over year. For example enrollment trend has been bad relative to state & peer average for a long time. When the BOE lets the administration focus on smaller time frames in isolation, they can just deploy whack-a-mole type excuses like “covid disruption” or “birth rate”.