New Study Finds That Money Has a Large Effect on Student Achievement, But It Is Not News--It Is a Sad Reminder of What We Must Do
The New York Times took note of a new school funding study Monday, titling the article It Turns Out Spending More Probably Does Improve Education. The study by Julien Lafortune, Jesse Rothstein, and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach found that school funding "reforms lead to sharp, immediate, and sustained increases in spending in low-income school districts. Using representative samples from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, we find that reforms cause increases in the achievement of students in these districts, phasing in gradually over the years following the reform. The implied effect of school resources on educational achievement is large." To put it in perspective, they write "After desegregation, school finance reform is perhaps the most important education policy change in the United States in the last half century."
Our results thus show that money can and does matter in education . . . School finance reforms are blunt tools, and some critics have argued that they will be offset by changes in district or voter choices over tax rates or that funds will be spent so inefficiently as to be wasted. Our results do not support these claims. Courts and legislatures can evidently force improvements in school quality for students in low-income districts. But there is an important caveat to this conclusion. As we discuss in Section VI, the average low-income student does not live in a particularly low-income district, so is not well targeted by a transfer of resources to the latter. Thus, we find that finance reforms reduced achievement gaps between high- and low-income school districts but did not have detectable effects on resource or achievement gaps between high- and low-income (or white and black) students. Attacking these gaps via school finance policies would require changing the allocation of resources within school districts, something that was not attempted by the reforms that we study.
To be clear, I will be citing and relying on this study in my own work. It is a good one, but those who have studied school funding for years will be a little miffed with the New York Times' framing of the study. This new study, while high in quality and nuance, does not reveal something particular new. It is incorrect to suggest the study's findings Education Law Prof Blog:
