School Finance Reality vs. the Money Doesn’t Matter Echo Chamber
An eclectic mix of politicians, philanthropists, conservative (and not-so-conservative) think tanks and a select few scholars have, for decades, created an echo chamber for the claim that more money will not help improve America’s schools. The claim is most often backed by two facile evidentiary bases: First, that the U.S. spends far more than other developed nations on elementary and secondary education, but performs much worse on international assessments (OECD, 2012); and second, that US education spending has for decades grown dramatically while test scores have remained flat (Gates, 2011). A third prong of this argument is that U.S. states have done their part to target additional resources to higher poverty and urban school districts in the past few decades, and that these efforts have been unfruitful, as achievement gaps persist.
International comparisons of school spending and outcomes are fraught with imprecision, where elementary and secondary education expenses across nations include vastly different services and related expenditures: differences in whether or not employee pension and healthcare costs are included, differences in provision of special education services (through health versus education sectors) and differences in responsibility for extracurricular offerings or transportation expenses. Existing data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) on national education expenditures make no effort to achieve comparability and thus, cross national comparisons of rate of return on the School Finance Reality vs. the Money Doesn’t Matter Echo Chamber | School Finance 101: