On August 20, Marguerite Roza of Georgetown’s Edunomics Lab stood before Governor Lamont’s Blue-Ribbon Commission on K-12 Education Funding and Accountability and gave Connecticut the same show she has been taking from state to state: a cloud of dots, a slide titled “Weak ROI,” and, on her lab’s Connecticut page, the same 2013 starting line. The Commission is supposed to deliver recommendations by January for a system its own guiding principles say must be adequate, one that “provides the level of resources necessary to serve all students.” Not one graph in Roza’s deck measures what adequacy costs. Not one.
I’ve written a Connecticut-specific brief taking the deck apart, using the National Education Cost Model and Roza’s own graphs:
On Marguerite Roza’s Deceitful Presentation in Connecticut (PDF)
How many times does this need to be said?
I have spent my career building the tools that actually answer the question Roza pretends to answer: what it costs to get kids to a given outcome, given who they are, where their schools hire teachers and how big their districts are. I created the School Finance Indicators Database and the cost models behind it. I’ve testified in school funding litigation and before legislatures across the country. And I have been calling out this particular body of work, in public and with receipts, for seventeen years:
- 2009: a peer-reviewed article in Education Policy Analysis Archives examining the weighted student funding “showcase” districts promoted in this line of work.
- 2010–2011: a run of posts dismantling the claims one at a time:
- “New from the Center on Inventing Research Findings” (Aug. 2010)
- “The problem? Cheerleading and Ceramics, of course!” (Dec. 2010)
- “Stretching Truth, Not Dollars?” (Jan. 2011)
- “Thinking through cost-benefit analysis and layoff policies” (Jan. 2011)
- “School Funding Equity Smokescreens” (Feb. 2011)
- “Resource Deprivation in High Need Districts?” (May 2011)
- “School Finance through Roza-Tinted Glasses: 5 School Funding Myths from a single Misguided Source” (June 2011)
- October 2011: the infamous “productivity curve,” a graph with no data behind it at all, presented to New York’s Regents. I covered it in “Dumbest completely fabricated (but still serious?) graph ever! (so far)” and “On the Real Dangers of Marguerite Roza’s Fake Graph”.
- 2013: a National Education Policy Center review of the Education Resource Strategies analysis of Baltimore’s Fair Student Funding.
- February 2025: testimony to Oregon’s joint House and Senate education committees after Roza showed them the same spending-and-scores charts. I told them the methods and data “are wholly insufficient for making any judgment” about whether that state’s money was well spent.
- August 2026: a video critique, with transcript, of the Edunomics graphs.
- September 2026: “Seventeen Years of Roza-Tinted Glasses”. It indexes 24 blog entries from August 2009 to August 2026, 21 of them on Roza.
- September 2026: “Efficiently Mediocre: Why measuring school efficiency requires measuring cost”.
- October 2026: “Misinform, Not Inform”, the New Jersey brief.
By my count, Connecticut is something like the thirtieth time I’ve publicly documented the same moves. As I put it on Bluesky: “for anyone still using this kind of garbage, you’ve been on notice for years.”
It’s not just me
When the same graphs landed in Oregon last year, the Oregon PTA sent lawmakers a 10-page rebuttal. It named exactly the trick I keep naming: “By starting the chart in 2013, Edunomics Lab has chosen a particular low point in school funding as a starting point,” and “We don’t know what test scores would be like if expenditures hadn’t increased.”
Education Week asked researchers about the charts. USC’s Morgan Polikoff: “The message it perpetuates is, school spending is unrelated to student achievement. But that isn’t true.” Allovue founder Jess Gartner: “If you want to share that information side by side, it needs to come with a lot of context.” Katie Roy of Education Resource Strategies: “People who do not have a lot of experience looking at data, charts, and graphs can very easily, just by mistake, misunderstand.” And Chad Aldeman, columnist for The 74: “You can’t just assume that because one trend goes up at one rate, the other trend goes up at the same rate.”
The genre is not new, either. When then-Secretary Betsy DeVos pushed a spending-versus-NAEP chart in 2018, the Shanker Institute’s Matthew Di Carlo called that kind of graph “just one big example of sloppy causal inference” and warned that “using ‘The Graph’s’ approach, one could prove almost anything.” Roza’s version just adds a cherry-picked baseline.
And in the room in Hartford, people saw through it. Lisa Hammersley of the School and State Finance Project told the Commission “it’s just more of a nuanced conversation than just looking at these spots on the graph.” New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker called the framing “condescending and accusatory.” Rep. Tina Courpas (R-Greenwich), questioning whether the state could judge what each town can afford to raise, noted there are “a million things that the state can’t possibly be privy to.” When a Democratic big-city mayor and a Greenwich Republican both push back on your presentation, the problem isn’t partisanship. The problem is the presentation.
What the deck actually did
The brief has the details. Here’s the short version.
The scatterplot refutes its own sermon. Slide 28’s headline is “High poverty districts underspend their peers,” and it’s true. Then the same cloud gets used to argue that districts “with similar wealth” perform differently, so some must be managing money better. Measure what outcomes cost and the cloud snaps into a line. Across Connecticut districts in 2024, raw spending correlates with outcomes at +0.24. Spending relative to the cost of Massachusetts-average outcomes correlates at +0.73. Bridgeport, Waterbury and Hartford each spend about a third of what Massachusetts-average outcomes would cost them. That isn’t inefficiency. That’s deprivation.
The 2013 trend line is rigged by design. The Connecticut graph on Edunomics’ website starts in 2013, at the top of national NAEP and after the post-recession damage was done. Measured against cost, Connecticut fell from 121% of what Massachusetts-average outcomes would cost in 2009 to 97% in 2013 and 71% in 2024. The highest-poverty fifth of districts went from 93% to 67% to 49%. Even Edunomics’ own caption concedes 8th-grade math “saw gains in 2024 with recovery investments.” So much for “Weak ROI.”
The staffing slide can’t keep its own numbers straight. Slide 37 says Connecticut had 103,112 school employees in 2024–25. Slide 43, citing the same Edunomics staffing tool for the same year, says 101,152. Slide 37 says districts “have already lost 3% of enrollment,” while its own chart shows a 7% drop from its chosen baseline. And the “too many staff” story collapses on Roza’s own slide 43: Connecticut added just 176 teachers in six years. The growth is in paraprofessionals and school-based specialists, which is exactly where you’d expect it with rising special education needs and temporary federal relief. Meanwhile district and central administration fell by a third. Roza told the Commission “there is a villain, and it is young people. They’re not having enough kids.” Fine: enrollment is falling, and nobody disputes it. But a slide that turns paraprofessionals and specialists serving rising needs into “overcommitting” isn’t analysis. It’s a verdict in search of a chart.
Enough
This isn’t a difference of methodological taste. It’s a presentation that strips out cost, picks its baselines to manufacture a conclusion, and points a state commission at its poorest districts as if they were the problem. It has been explained, patiently and repeatedly, in peer review, in policy briefs, in legislative testimony and in the press, for seventeen years. Repeating it after all that isn’t an oversight. It’s a choice.
The Commission owes Connecticut’s children a report grounded in what adequacy costs. These graphs should be nowhere near it: not in the January report, not in testimony, not in budget hearings, not in board training. And anyone who puts them in front of Connecticut policymakers should be asked, publicly, why they chose 2013 and why they left out cost.
Read the full Connecticut brief: On Marguerite Roza’s Deceitful Presentation in Connecticut (PDF)
