Educate Nevada Now, an advocacy group, contends the state’s intent was clearly to decide how many students it wants to serve and use the secret algorithm to allow them to meet that need and nothing beyond it.
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Nevada is using a secret algorithm to determine which students are considered at-risk enough to warrant additional education funding, raising concerns about transparency.
Developed for the State of Nevada by Minnesota-based tech company Infinite Campus, the algorithm is said to use “machine learning and decades of student data to identify patterns of predictability.” It assigns each K-12 public school student a “graduation related analytic data” (GRAD) score using dozens of data points, including their cumulative GPA, tardies and absences, changes in home address, and immigrant status.
Infinite Campus calls it an “early warning” system. Numerous states and districts have contracted with the company to analyze their students. But it appears only Nevada is using the algorithm to allocate its public funding.
Proponents say it is a data-driven approach that allows the state to better target its finite amount of at-risk funding. They say students with the lowest GRAD scores should be the ones benefiting from the resources that additional funding allows for.
“The funding you’re applying gets diluted on a per-student basis the larger that base is,” Commission on School Funding Chair Guy Hobbs told state lawmakers during a recent legislative subcommittee on education accountability.
“Trying to arrive at something where you’re actually targeting the funds to those who are truly in need of the additional counseling or other support programs that are there to help the at-risk students is more sensible,” he added.
But critics are concerned about the outsourcing of critical public funding decisions to a third-party contractor whose proprietary algorithm isn’t fully transparent to taxpayers or the school districts dependent on its funding.
“I’m not a fan of relying on any third-party vendor for deciding funding, whether that’s in education or health care,” Assemblywoman Selena Torres (D-Las Vegas) told the Current.
Torres, a teacher turned charter school executive director, said school leaders she has spoken to are concerned because they don’t know what weight each risk factor is given. That makes it difficult to understand who the state now considers at-risk of not graduating, and it makes it more difficult to design appropriate programming or support to get them on track.
“It’s very possible that there’s information that schools are not even inputting into the system,” Torres said. “Even a small change can make the difference as to whether or not that school is going to get that funding.”
Infinite Campus did not respond to a request for comment for this story. But representatives for the company have previously pushed back on the characterization of their algorithm as secretive, noting their platform allows district officials to see student GRAD scores in real time. A list of the 75 risk factors considered by the algorithm was made public, though the weights of each factor remain a secret.
When the GRAD score algorithm was first implemented in Nevada, race and gender were among the factors considered. That raised ethical and practical concerns about how the algorithm treated two students whose only difference is gender or race, two federally protected classes. Race and gender have since been removed as factors, but the overarching issue remains unresolved, argues Torres.
School leaders have also raised concerns the algorithm will lead to funding instability as factors are shifted without notice.
A representative from Washoe County School District told state lawmakers the urban district saw their at-risk funding cut by a third in 2024 — from $15 million to $10 million. The district was able to maintain its existing programming for at-risk students, he said, but continuous wild fluctuations in the budget would be difficult to weather.
Educate Nevada Now, an advocacy group that has opposed the new handling of at-risk funding, has argued in public comments to the Commission on School Funding that the state’s intent was clearly to decide how many students it wants to serve and use the secret algorithm to allow them to meet that need and nothing beyond it.
“Adjusting eligibility was a selling point, not a deal-breaker,” the advocacy group wrote earlier this year, and as a result “thousands of vulnerable students who are not served by the new formula will continue to suffer from abysmal academic outcomes.”
The move to the GRAD score algorithm came as part of the state’s new “pupil-centered funding formula,” which the legislature first passed in 2019. As part of that yearslong rollout, lawmakers changed the formal definition of “at-risk” to allow for the adoption of the Infinite Campus algorithm.
Once the algorithm began being used, the number of students the state considered at-risk plummeted to approximately 63,000 in 2024 from 288,000 in 2023. That number represents the students whose GRAD scores are in the lowest quintile.
Lawmakers promised the new funding formula would be “significantly less complicated and more transparent” than the antiquated one it replaced, recalled Chris Daly, executive director of the Nevada State Education Association. “As it turns out, it’s not less complicated and this path of a proprietary algorithm is clearly less transparent.”
Prior to the new funding formula, the State of Nevada had seen success with targeted programs that provided additional funding to specific schools with high percentages of students classified as English language learners (ELL) or free and reduced lunch eligible (FRL), a proxy for low-income households. NSEA and ENN have argued that those programs — known as Zoom and Victory schools — galvanized school climate and culture and were seen as community building.
The new approach being embraced by the state is hyper-individualized and less community focused, says Daly. It highlights the broad philosophical differences that emerge when policymakers must decide who to help when they cannot, or will not, help everyone.
“It’s emblematic of bigger problems that Nevada education is facing,” adds Daly. “We’re still underfunded.”
Funding below national average
The Commission on School Funding this month submitted to the Nevada State Legislature an expansive report about the new funding formula and larger education issues, such as how the state can reach national per-pupil spending levels. The complete report has not yet been made public, but Hobbs highlighted some of its findings to state lawmakers during the subcommittee on education accountability.
He noted that the commission found Nevada will spend $12,579 per pupil in fiscal year 2025, compared to the national average of $17,476.
Senate Majority Leader Nicole Cannizzaro (D-Las Vegas) disputed the Nevada dollar amount, saying it did not include $250 million in additional money earmarked by lawmakers in a 2023 bill for educator and staff raises. That money would bring the total up by $265 per student, she claimed.
That additional money would bring the Nevada total to $12,844 per pupil — still $4,632 per pupil below the national average.