Maryland · 24 school districts

Education — Family vs Budget

Across every Maryland school district, per-pupil spending barely predicts student proficiency. The share of single-parent households does.

Mission

Public debate about school performance in Maryland centres on spending. Education — Family vs Budget puts every county on a single chart and shows that per-pupil spending barely predicts student proficiency, while the share of single-parent households tracks closely with reading and math results. The point is not to assign blame — it is to make the actual numbers visible so the conversation can start from facts.

Reading the charts

Each dot is one of Maryland’s 24 school districts. Click any dot or table row to lock its details into the selected card below the chart.

Bubble size = per-pupil spending. Bigger circles are higher-spending districts. To make the differences visible at a glance, the size is keyed to spending abovea $16,500 baseline rather than absolute dollars — otherwise every bubble would look nearly identical.

r² (shown under each chart title) is the squared Pearson correlation coefficient: 1.0 means the two axes move in lockstep, 0.0 means they have no statistical relationship at all. A trend line is also drawn through each scatter for visual reference.

Two charts, one argument. Family structureplots single-parent household share against math proficiency — a strong negative relationship. Per-pupil spendingplots dollars spent against the same math axis — essentially no relationship. The contrast is the point.

Data Sources

Every number on this site comes from a publicly available government dataset. Originals are linked below; local mirrors and a combined CSV are listed in the Downloads section.

Per-pupil spending

Maryland Department of Legislative Services — 2025 Per-Pupil State and Local Spending · FY 2025

State + local dollars spent per enrolled student, by school district. Tabulated annually by the DLS Office of Policy Analysis.

dls.maryland.gov

ELA & math proficiency

Maryland State Department of Education — Maryland Report Card · 2024 school year

Percentage of students meeting or exceeding the state proficiency standard in English/Language Arts and Mathematics, by school district. Pulled from the MSDE Report Card data downloads.

reportcard.msde.maryland.gov

Single-parent household share

U.S. Census Bureau — American Community Survey, Table S1101 (Households and Families) · 2024 5-Year Estimates

Share of households with own children under 18 that are headed by a single parent (male or female householder, no spouse present). Derived from the raw S1101 estimates.

data.census.gov — S1101, Maryland counties

Methodology: Derived as (S1101_C03_005E + S1101_C04_005E) / S1101_C01_005E. Full methodology, alternatives, and per-county margin of error →

Downloads

The combined dataset and the source publications that feed it. Raw upstream data for the single-parent metric is fetched fresh from data.census.gov rather than mirrored here.

CSV

Combined dataset (this project)

All 24 districts: county, FIPS, single-parent %, math %, ELA %, per-pupil $. Ready to open in Excel or any spreadsheet.

4 KB

CSV

Single-parent household share (derived, with MoE)

The single-parent percentage for each county, the underlying Census counts (households with kids, single-dad, single-mom), and the 90% margin of error per county.

4 KB

PDF

2025 Per-Pupil State and Local Spending

The Maryland DLS publication that lists per-pupil spending for every county school system.

836 KB

JSON

App data feed (JSON)

The same combined dataset in JSON form — this is what the charts read at runtime.

3 KB

These files live in the repository under webapp/public/sources/ (and webapp/public/ed-spend.json for the app data feed). The single-parent CSV carries enough detail to reproduce the calculation from scratch.

Data Types

Per-pupil spendingELA proficiencyMath proficiencySingle-parent household shareCounty demographics

How It Works

Collect spending and proficiency

Per-pupil spending and ELA/math proficiency rates are pulled from the Maryland State Department of Education Report Card for all 24 county school systems.

Collect family-structure data

Single-parent household share for each county comes from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey family-structure tables.

Combine into a single dataset

All four measures are joined by county into one static dataset so the relationships can be compared directly without further computation at request time.

Visualise and rank

The scatter plots single-parent share against math proficiency, with bubble size encoding per-pupil spending. The table ranks each county on all three measures so outliers are easy to spot.

Key Roles

Maryland State Department of Education

Publishes annual assessment results and per-pupil finance figures for every county school system.

County School Systems

The 24 local education agencies whose spending and proficiency figures are compared here.

U.S. Census Bureau

Source for county-level family-structure data via the American Community Survey.

Pellucid Labs is an independent project and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the Maryland State Department of Education, any county school system, or the U.S. Census Bureau. All data is sourced from publicly available figures.