All red states should immediately audit their biggest school districts

At the end of June, an audit of Jefferson County Public Schools was released to the public. The largest district in Kentucky, Jefferson County (which includes Louisville) enrolls almost 100,000 students — one in seven students in the state.

The report by auditor Allison Ball reveals the system’s complete institutional failure.

In 2024, Kentucky House Bill 6 compelled a special examination of Jefferson County schools and provided the funds to do so. Over the course of a few months, the auditing team reviewed over 2,000 documents from the 2022 through 2025 school years, visited schools, surveyed websites, and facilitated thousands of focus groups, interviews, and surveys.

The investigation reveals financial mismanagement, administrative bloat, and a school district without a clear direction, purpose or plan.

Reading the nearly 500-page report, what strikes one first is the flood of cash in which the district is drowning. Over 20 years, the per-pupil revenue has risen 62 percent, adjusted for inflation. Over the last decade, the school board approved the maximum property tax increase every single year. The report veers into exasperated disbelief when Ball writes that, despite receiving a bonus $500 million in additional funds during COVID, the district “somehow began running a budget deficit.”

Meanwhile, only 32 percent of elementary students scored as proficient readers on standardized tests. Did the money go to teachers? Nope. The average teacher salary has only increased by 12 percent over two decades.

In Ball’s words , the district has “a spending, not a revenue, problem.”

The list of concerns in the report is long. The district lacks a current and cohesive plan. Its board operates with too little focus on student outcomes. Twenty-six percent of its schools are under-enrolled. One fifth of all its students feel unsafe at school.

Stakeholders reported concerns about limited transparency and lack of input on the board’s decisions. Some teachers appeared uncertain or lacked clarity regarding curriculum content. The district has $1.3 billion in unmet facilities needs. For the 2022-23 and 2024-25 school years, 33,358 behavior incidents on buses were committed by repeat offenders — 78 percent of all such incidents.

Some of the most damning points in the report are the most prosaic. For example, no policy requires a written bid before the district enters into contracts with vendors.

By the end of the report, the reader is left with the impression that this district is filled with individuals with no clue how to manage the state’s largest school system.

This is not just a matter of woke Marxists trying to indoctrinate your children. Rather, it is an assemblage of mediocre to incompetent staff with no concept of governance, tradeoffs or management involved in running an organization. If this were a business, every single administrator in the school district would probably be fired, and the district would perform better as a result.

A district-wide breakdown such as this does not occur in a vacuum. Nor is this problem isolated to one school system in one state. Rather, a number of incentives and first principles make such systemic failure a norm in public K-12 education.

A refusal to acknowledge tradeoffs and limitations (a school cannot be all things to all students) means that districts chase too many goals and extend their resources far beyond their reasonable capacities. Traditional pipelines for leadership — from teacher to principal to district administrator — reward instructional excellence. But institutional leadership requires a different skillset from that of an excellent educator.

Despite financial mismanagement, an ever-increasing budget only rewards fiscal irresponsibility. Top-heavy personnel trees mean vampiric district offices suck away resources from schools before funds reach the classroom, teachers, and students.

These systemic issues are far too numerous for any one policy to fix. There is no one standardized test, curriculum, school choice policy, or funding formula that will shift all incentives, change all minds, and suddenly develop the operational excellence necessary to run a complex school system.

What are the answers? Well, there is fiscal austerity, strengthened personnel pipelines, better curriculum, increased accountability, slashed regulations and smarter pay structures, to name just a few. And notably, although I love highfalutin calls for a return to classical education and debates over first principles, this audit suggests a need for something much simpler first: a development of competence.

Can schools even keep the trains running on time, professional roles clarified and teachers knowledgeable of their curriculum?

A sober, comprehensive audit such as this one should be conducted everywhere. It provides an unsparing look into school districts’ straits, thereby emphasizing the need for comprehensive reform beyond mere funding increases. In fact, a thorough analysis of the report suggests that another blank check will only make matters worse — the same way another hit of a drug relieves symptoms in the moment but worsens addiction.

This audit lists not only complaints, but also recommendations for improvement.

Were every red state in the country to compel such audits of their largest school systems, the vastness of public education’s failures would become apparent. Pat answers would no longer suffice. Systemic failure requires comprehensive reform. The findings of this audit would be difficult for any district to face, but kudos to Kentucky for being willing at least to acknowledge them.

Other states would be wise to do the same.

Daniel Buck is a research fellow and the director of the Conservative Education Reform Network at the American Enterprise Institute.