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3.4. Costs Data and Budgetary Information
ОглавлениеA very common question often arises: Why should we go to all this trouble to estimate costs? Almost all social programs have budgets and expenditure statements, which presumably contain expenditure data that can be used to address the cost issues. However, there are many reasons why budgetary information is inadequate for cost analysis.
First, although the existence of budgets is universal, the assumption that they will contain all the cost information that is needed is usually erroneous. First, budgets often do not include cost information on all the resources used in the intervention. Contributed resources such as volunteers, donated equipment and services, and other “unpaid” inputs are not included in budgets.
Second, when resources have already been paid for or are included in some other agency’s budget, they will not be easily observed. For example, a building that is provided to a school district by some other unit of government or one that is fully paid for will not be found in the budget of a school district. Many education interventions receive ingredients from multiple levels. For example, Reading Partners, a reading program coordinated through a national office, operates through reading centers within schools and utilizes resources from AmeriCorps, the national community service organization, as well as relying on volunteers (Jacob, Armstrong, Bowden, & Pan, 2016). To accurately estimate costs, all resources used to implement Reading Partners should be calculated.
Third, the standard budget practices may distort the true costs of an ingredient. Typical public budgets and expenditure statements charge the cost of major repairs or facility reconstruction only to the year in which the cost was incurred. Thus, when the roof or heating system of a school is replaced, the expenditures are found in the budget for the year in which the repairs were financed—typically the year in which the reconstruction was done rather than being amortized properly. Yet, a new roof or heating system may have a 30-year life so that only about one-thirtieth of it should be charged to the cost of programs in any given year. Budgetary conventions would typically charge the costs of such capital investments to a single budgetary year, overstating the true costs for that year and understating the costs of operating the program for the 29 subsequent years.
Fourth, the costs of any particular intervention are often embedded in a budget or expenditure statement that covers a much larger unit of operation. Therefore, it may be difficult to isolate the unique costs of a new reading program in a school district budget, since the budget is not constructed according to the costs of particular interventions or activities. In fact, most educational budgets are “line item” classifications of expenditures according to functions and objects. Examples of functions include administration, instruction, and maintenance. Examples of objects include teachers, supplies, clericals, and administrators. It is not only difficult to tie such budget listings to particular activities or interventions but also often impossible even to ascertain what the costs are for a given school or broad instructional program such as a language program, since no such breakdowns are usually provided.
Finally, most budgetary documents represent plans for how resources will be allocated rather than classifying expenditures after they have taken place. This means that, at best, they refer to planned disbursements rather than actual ones. Accordingly, beyond all their other limitations for cost analysis, budgets may not provide precise figures for actual resource use. Actual statements of expenditures may be more accurate, but they are still subject to the shortcomings mentioned before.
Finally, budgets rarely help elucidate how a program is implemented—or at least not in a way that is related to the theory of change or the counterfactual. This point is illustrated in the cost analysis of Read 180 by Levin, Catlin, and Olson (2007). Using the ingredients method, the researchers calculated program costs at three selected sites where Read 180 was being delivered; they also calculated the program costs based on the developer’s recommended version of Read 180 from interviews and documents. Given that Read 180 is a reasonably formulaic reading intervention, we might anticipate that the actual costs at the three sites would be close to the recommended cost. The developer’s recommended version of Read 180 required changes in both personnel and materials. However, as implemented, some sites relied on adding more personnel than others while others yet varied in materials. The result was a significant difference in average costs for each site.
For these reasons, cost analysis cannot place primary reliance on budgetary or expenditure documents to ascertain the costs of interventions. Of course, these documents may still provide supplementary data that will be very useful. However, they cannot serve as a principal source for constructing cost estimates.