More Money Really Does Make Schools Better
It has become an article of faith among education reformers that throwing more money at public education doesn’t improve student performance. But a steady drumbeat of careful research studies is calling this into question. What if more money really does work?
The case against spending more on schools comes in two basic forms. One is to look at various U.S. states, and see whether the ones that spend more on education enjoy better outcomes. This has been done many times, with decidedly mixed results. Some studies show littlestate-by-state correlation between spending levels and educational performance, while others show a fairly substantial one.
The second case against increased spending comes from looking at correlations across time. If more money is better, we’d expect to see increases in school funding followed by improvements in performance. In fact, though public school spending has increased a lot in the past couple of decades, achievement hasn't really increased much.
So with mixed evidence from state-by-state analysis and discouraging evidence from the history of spending increases, many people are ready to conclude that throwing more money at education is a losing battle. Some spending opponents place their hopes in charter schools and other reform efforts, while others claim that education just doesn’t work -- that academic ability is either innate or learned from an early age.
But the discouraging evidence cited above is all about correlation, not causation. States that spend more on education might do so because people in those states value education more highly. But those states also might spend more because they need to. That might be the case because they have a population that gets less education at home, or because local living costs are higher or because transportation is more costly. To make an analogy, if we compared spending on cancer treatments to rates of cancer, we’d undoubtedly find that regions with more cancer spend more on chemotherapy and radiation therapy. But that doesn’t mean those remedies are ineffective -- it just means people spend more because they need the treatments.
Similarly, the lack of improved national performance doesn’t mean that increased spending was ineffectual. During that period, the U.S. had a large influx of low-skilled immigrants, who are bound to rely on public schools more and parents less. There also was a large increase in single parenthood, which probably means those kids get less education at home as well. Public schools had to fight these headwinds and without the extra money, educational outcomes might have increased less than they did or even declined.
So beware of correlations. Instead, when asking whether spending more on education boosts outcomes, it's better to look at policy experiments, such as situations where spending was suddenly increased.
One recent such study found that increased spending between 1955 and 1985 improved student performance substantially in places where courts ordered schools to spend more. But the mid-20th century might be a very different time than today. The U.S. population has changed, for one thing. Also, it might be that we wrung out all the available improvements from increased spending long ago, and that More Money Really Does Make Schools Better - Bloomberg View:
