School Resource Allocation: Why the Cheapest Option Can Cost Schools More
School leaders have to make extraordinarily difficult decisions about money.
That is particularly true in schools serving low-income communities. There are never enough resources to address every need. A principal might be choosing between another staff member, a tutoring program, new technology, professional development, or dozens of other legitimate priorities.
Sometimes they are told they have money available, only to have the allocation reduced later.
I understand why price matters.
But after more than 15 years of working with schools, I’ve also learned something that sounds counterintuitive:
Schools with the fewest resources can least afford to buy something simply because it is cheaper.
They need value.
And those are not the same thing.
Schools Aren't Really Buying Tutoring or Software
When a school comes to PRACTICE for tutoring, it is easy to think they are buying tutoring hours.
When they purchase our Gradebook, it is easy to think they are buying software licenses.
I don’t think either is true.
Schools are buying a result.
A principal doesn’t inherently need 1,000 tutoring hours. They need more students to master Algebra, become stronger readers, pass an exam, earn credits, or get back on track.
They don’t inherently need another piece of education technology. They need teachers, administrators, students, and families to have better information so they can make better decisions.
That distinction matters because purchasing more of something does not necessarily produce more of the outcome you want.
I learned that lesson early in PRACTICE’s history.
The Summer Program That Changed How I Think About Price
In one of our early years, a school hired us to run a summer program.
We priced the program relatively inexpensively. Our responsibility was largely to provide the academic program, while the school would handle much of the student and family outreach.
We prepared to serve two classes of students.
As summer approached, we kept reminding the school that families needed to hear about the opportunity and students needed to enroll. The school intended to do it. But anyone who has worked inside a school knows what the final weeks of the school year look like.
There were a thousand other priorities.
The outreach kept getting pushed back.
By the time the summer program began, far fewer students showed up than we had built the program to serve.
The students who participated benefited. But there were empty seats that the school had paid for.
On paper, we had sold an inexpensive program.
In reality, it wasn’t particularly inexpensive at all.
The following summer, we changed our approach.
We charged more because we took responsibility for more.
We started earlier. We hired and trained staff earlier. We obtained family contact information and began outreach in May. We held orientations. We worked to get students and families excited about the opportunity instead of assuming enrollment would take care of itself.
That summer, the program filled.
We even had a waitlist.
The school had paid more for the program, but its investment reached substantially more students and produced better overall value.
That experience changed how I thought about pricing forever.
Sometimes making a program cheaper means removing the very things required to make it work.
The Right Question Isn't "How Much Do I Get?"
Imagine a principal has $100,000 available for tutoring.
One provider promises twice as many tutoring hours as another.
It is completely reasonable for the principal to ask: Why wouldn’t I take twice the tutoring?
I would ask a different question:
What has to be true for those tutoring hours to actually produce results?
Research on high-impact tutoring gives us some clues. Strong programs generally involve frequent sessions, sustained participation, consistent tutors, high-quality instruction, and thoughtful integration into the school day. Effective programs commonly provide tutoring three or more times each week for at least ten weeks, with older students often receiving sessions lasting 30 to 60 minutes.
Those aren’t small implementation details.
They are part of the intervention.
If students are supposed to receive tutoring three times per week but actually attend once every other week, buying twice as many theoretical hours doesn’t solve the problem.
If tutors aren’t trained or supported, more hours don’t solve the problem.
If tutors constantly turn over, more hours don’t necessarily solve the problem.
If nobody notices that the intervention isn’t being delivered as designed until three months later, more hours don’t solve the problem.
I would rather see a school purchase fewer hours and protect the conditions that make those hours effective than purchase an enormous quantity of tutoring that students never consistently receive.
The goal isn’t to maximize tutoring hours purchased. It’s to maximize student progress produced.
Much of What You're Paying For Is Invisible
School leaders understand something about education that can be difficult to see from the outside.
Someone walking past a classroom might see a teacher teaching 30 students and assume that’s the service the school provides.
But a principal knows what had to happen before those 30 students ever sat down.
Someone had to recruit and select the teacher. Someone built the master schedule. Students were programmed into the right courses. Curriculum was selected. Teachers were trained. Assessments were developed. Administrators established systems for observing instruction, analyzing results, supporting teachers, communicating with families, and intervening when something wasn’t working.
The 45 minutes of instruction are simply the most visible part of an enormous amount of work.
The same is true of a well-run tutoring program.
A school sees the Education Champion working with students. What it doesn’t necessarily see are the hundreds of decisions behind that interaction.
Our team obsesses over questions like: What should we ask during an interview to identify someone who will succeed with students? What characteristics consistently show up in our strongest Education Champions? What should they learn before entering a classroom? How should we prepare them to work alongside a teacher? What do we do when a student is disengaged? What information should supervisors monitor? When should we intervene? What patterns across thousands of previous programs should change how we design the next one?
The same thing happens with our Gradebook.
Building software isn’t simply deciding which features users request and adding them. We have to ask which features will actually solve meaningful problems for the schools we serve. How will they fit into existing workflows? What barriers will teachers encounter? What do administrators need to see? What will make information more accessible to families? And what have we learned from years of working specifically with schools serving low-income communities that should influence how the product is designed?
Much of that work will never appear as a line item on a proposal.
It shouldn’t.
But it is part of what a school is paying for.
The visible product is the tutoring session or the software. The value is also in the system behind it.
And principals already understand why that matters, because they build those systems inside their own schools every day.
The Same Problem Exists With Education Technology
Schools encounter a similar problem when purchasing technology.
Software can look inexpensive on a per-student basis, particularly when a vendor can distribute essentially the same product to thousands of additional users.
But access is not adoption.
And adoption is not impact.
A 2019 analysis of 200,000 curriculum software licenses purchased across 275 schools found that an average of 67% of licenses went unused.
Think about what that means for school resource allocation.
A $10 license nobody uses is infinitely more expensive per active user than a $20 license everybody uses.
That’s why I often tell our team that there is no such thing as just education technology. Everything is really services.
Someone has to implement the technology.
Teachers need to understand it.
Administrators need workflows that fit the reality of their school.
Families need to be able to access it.
People need somewhere to go when something isn’t working.
That’s why PRACTICE includes unlimited training and support with our Gradebook. If a school needs additional onboarding or training during the year, we want to provide it.
Sometimes a school asks us to make an improvement that costs us a meaningful amount to build—even relative to what that individual school paid us.
We still have to seriously consider it.
Because our responsibility isn’t merely to provide login credentials.
It is to help the school successfully use the product.
What Are You Actually Asking the School to Do?
There is another cost that rarely appears on a proposal: school capacity.
When evaluating two vendors, principals should ask:
What does this provider need my team to do in order for its solution to work?
Does the school have to recruit the students?
Manage attendance?
Supervise the tutors?
Train teachers?
Troubleshoot the technology?
Monitor quality?
Replace staff when someone leaves?
Chase the vendor when something goes wrong?
Every responsibility shifted onto the school consumes capacity.
And school leaders and teachers don’t have unlimited capacity.
Our early summer program taught me that a school can genuinely intend to complete a task and still struggle to get it done. That isn’t because educators don’t care. It’s because they are managing hundreds of students, families, staff members, mandates, emergencies, schedules, assessments, and competing priorities.
A solution that depends on the school absorbing significant additional work may therefore be much more expensive than its proposal suggests.
Responsiveness and Accountability Have Economic Value
Some of our longest-standing school partners have told us that PRACTICE isn’t always the least expensive option.
They’ve also told us why they continue working with us.
Two words come up repeatedly:
Responsiveness and accountability.
School leaders have shared stories with us about vendors promising one thing during the sales process and delivering something entirely different. When the school needs help, suddenly nobody answers.
That is especially costly in education because time matters.
If students are preparing for an exam in June, a staffing problem in March can’t take six weeks to resolve.
Our goal is to respond, explain what happened, create an action plan, and make the necessary adjustment.
With our tutoring programs, for example, every school has supervision and support beyond the Education Champions working directly with students. We conduct quality check-ins, capture information about progress, coach our staff, and work to maintain consistency.
If an Education Champion turns over, we provide the school with an additional week of tutoring at no cost.
Why?
Because the school purchased a program from us, not merely a person.
And when something goes wrong, our job isn’t to explain why it isn’t our fault.
Our job is to help fix it.
Five Questions I'd Ask Before Choosing the Cheaper Vendor
If I were a principal comparing two proposals, I wouldn’t ignore price. Price absolutely matters.
But I would put the proposals next to each other and ask:
- What outcome am I actually purchasing? What specifically should be different for students, teachers, or families because we made this investment?
- What evidence supports this model? Not simply whether tutoring or technology works generally, but whether this particular design protects the conditions associated with success.
- What is actually included? Training, supervision, implementation, data, family engagement, replacements, technical support, and quality assurance can dramatically change the real cost of a program.
- What will my staff have to do? Every task assigned to teachers and administrators has a capacity cost, even when it doesn’t appear on the invoice.
- What happens when something goes wrong? Because eventually, something will. The quality of a partnership is often revealed by what happens next.
Only then would I compare the prices.
Final Thoughts: Low-Income Schools Cannot Afford Wasted Investments
There is a temptation to believe that schools with fewer resources should always seek the least expensive solution.
I believe the opposite lesson is just as important.
When resources are scarce, every dollar has to work harder.
That doesn’t mean schools should buy the most expensive option. Expensive does not automatically mean effective any more than cheap automatically means ineffective.
It means schools should demand evidence, implementation support, transparency, accountability, and a clear connection between what they’re purchasing and the result they’re trying to produce.
At PRACTICE, we’re not trying to make our programs as expensive as possible.
We’re trying to understand what resources are actually required to produce the outcomes we’ve promised.
Sometimes that means telling a school that we don’t think a proposed implementation will work.
Sometimes it means including services that another provider might charge for separately—or not provide at all.
Sometimes it means spending more ourselves when something doesn’t go according to plan.
And sometimes it means losing on price.
I’m comfortable with that.
Because after thousands of programs, I’ve learned that delivering something cheaply that doesn’t produce the intended result isn’t actually a bargain.
It’s wasted money.
And more importantly, it’s a missed opportunity for a child who may not get that time back.