It’s easy to get caught up on inputs when it comes to public policy. How much a policy costs, how long a project takes, and how many resources a goal needs. Education policy, unfortunately often gets stuck in this dynamic. Listen to any state legislator, congressman, senator, governor, or president, and at some point, you’ll likely hear them talk about how much they’ve done to increase education spending.

But as we’ve seen—again unfortunately—when it comes to education, increased spending does not automatically translate to better results.

This has been the reality for Iowa. While local governments and the state spend significantly (and increasingly) on education, the results for students have not followed the same trendlines. In 2024, 71% of Iowa’s fourth graders were below proficient in reading and 73% of eighth graders were below proficient in math. For any Iowa parent sending their child to learn and grow in Iowa schools, those figures are unacceptable.

As with most public policy issues, there isn’t necessarily one reason why Iowa schools are failing to equip students as they should. To try and address this ongoing issue, in 2024, the state legislature passed HF2618 to improve literacy scores. Yet, despite this state legislative action, Iowa’s decentralized education system—where local school boards maintain substantial control over curriculum, instructional time, and taxation—means local decisions have direct and significant consequences on how Iowa students are taught.

With a real problem, no clear solution, and slow progress, the Iowans for Tax Relief (ITR) team faced the challenge of how to best improve Iowa’s schools.

This is how the ITR Report Card was born.

Iowa has 327 school districts. This means Iowa has 327 school boards and mountains of data on school and district performance from around the state. So many facets to this issue meant traditional research analysis, a one-size-fits-all report or white paper wasn’t the right approach. So ITR developed an interactive, online district report card for all 327 districts in the state. The report card had two main audiences in mind: parents and school board members.

The ITR Report Card is an innovative web platform that delivers detailed fiscal and academic profiles for every school district in Iowa and the state as a whole. This user-friendly resource replaces static reports with dynamic tools that empower school board members, parents, and taxpayers to engage with data in real time.

Some of the report card’s key findings include:

  • Only 47% of district budgets go to classroom instruction, well below the 60% national benchmark.
  • Districts are spending an average of $18,704 per student, up from $15,590 just five years ago.
  • The state average for chronic absenteeism is 21%, with some districts exceeding 38%.
  • School property tax revenues have grown 40% over the past decade, while enrollment has remained essentially flat.

After they released the report card, ITR’s team began hearing more and more from school board members across the state about how—before now—they’ve lacked access to this information. These well-intentioned parents and community members expressed a strong desire to improve academic outcomes and manage spending responsibly, but as part-time, unpaid officials, they often relied solely on their district administrators. For the first time, these school boards and Iowans across the state now have access to clean, interactive, and up-to-date data about their local school districts to guide their decision-making.

The ITR report card garnered significant media coverage around the state. But the ITR team didn’t sit back and simply hope parents and school boards saw it in the news. ITR launched a targeted email campaign and contacted nearly 2,000 board members across every school district in the state.

The strategy worked. Because of the incredible earned media coverage and ITR’s targeted outreach, in the first eight weeks after launch, the ITR Report Card attracted over 5,600 unique visitors and generated over 12,600 unique page views. Just as importantly, it served as a key entry point for deeper civic engagement—resulting in almost 100 new individuals subscribing to receive ongoing updates from ITR.

Since the report card’s launch, school board members and parents have taken full advantage of having comprehensive and reliable data on spending and academic performance. This has fueled informed decision-making and calls for reform around the state. Because of these real and ongoing results from the report card, Iowans for Tax Relief are the winners of the SPN 2025 Bob Williams Award for Most Influential Research.

It’s easy to get caught up on the inputs when talking about public policy. But when talking about education policy, the results for students and families must always come first. Now, thanks to Iowans for Tax Reform, those results are available, understandable, and driving progress.