On Friday DCPS released its initial budget allocations for the 2014 school year. This year’s budget includes more information to help average parents and residents better understand the budget.

Easy-to-digest breakouts for individual schools show how DCPS is allocating funds among administrators, classroom teachers, special education, arts, and more. They show how each school’s funding has changed from the previous year and enrollment trends over several years. For example, here is the worksheet for Maury Elementary.

This format makes it simpler for people who are interested in the budget, but can’t spend the time poring over complex graphs or the rules that dictate how DCPS allocates money. DCPS is even providing a one-pager that allows you to quickly compare all DCPS schools on overall allocation and per pupil funding.

For people who want to compare funding among schools (like for example, how many schools get funding for a full-time librarian), however, the PDFs don’t organize the data in the most useful way. To analyze information across schools in more detail, you have to invest a significant amount of time clicking through individual PDFs, copying and pasting each amount and category into a spreadsheet.

To improve upon the current format, and to truly make this process transparent, DCPS could publish the budgets in a structured format like a spreadsheet, breaking out the allocations so that each allocation category is a cell in a row. Even better, OSSE could publish DCPS and DC public charter school allocations in a common structured (spreadsheet) format.

The best scenario would be to publish all school budgets as open data (free and machine-readable) in a central data catalog like data.dc.gov, and to publish not only allocations but actual expenditures. How about not just how we planned to spend the money, but how it was actually spent?

Sandra Moscoso is an international development consultant supporting government, private sector and NGOs in strengthening institutional and data transparency. A board member of the D.C. Open Government Coalition, School Without Walls HSA, and Ward 6 Public Schools Parent Organization. Sandra lives in Capitol Hill with her husband and two children.