Convetional wisdom is that education is one of the few problems you really can solve by throwing money at it. (In the old Soviet Union, the literacy rate was nearly 99%, or so I’ve read.) But in this thread – http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=7184355#post7184355 – Renob asserts (based on national aggregate statistics) that putting more money into education does not make educational systems more effective. Are there any studies that clearly settle this one way or the other?
Take a look at NAEP scores:
The District of Columbia, which spends almost $12,000 per student, is one of the worst performing states across all categories. Other states, such as Idaho (spending around $7000 per student) does much better. If the “conventional wisdom” that more money equals better schools is true, you would expect that DC would have higher test scores.
I’m looking for other data, but this is a start.
Here is a study by the RAND corporation on California finances. (Warning - pdf - big pdf.) The introduction seems to be what you are looking for. Pre Prop-13, Californias pre-student funding was $400 a student above national average. In 2000 it was $600 below - and this was after funding increases during the bubble. Though test score data for 1970 has been lost, several sources said that California test results were among the best in the country in 1978. Today they are the worst of the top 5 most populous states, and among the worst in the country. There are a lot of charts in this document giving relevent information.
Personally, we moved to California from New Jersey in 1986. The NJ schools had 8 periods a day, including language and science for all periods. California schools had 7. My daughter, in 8th grade when we moved, was 6 months to a year ahead of her peers, and had to take Math and French in the high school since she was far ahead of her peers here.
So, that’s one cite and one anecdote.
Data I’ve seem locally shows that test scores per school correlate well with the percentage of students requiring free or subsidized lunches. So, comparing Idaho vs DC is just absurd.
Yeah, you think the main difference between Iowa and DC is school funding? Obviously, there are some pretty major confounding variables there.
Idaho, sorry.
I look forward to seeing any cites you come up with.
One question I had that was an obvious oversight in another article you linked to (the National Review one) was that he gives no consideration to how much money goes to support programs mandated by the government (e.g., disability facilities, equal women’s sports, etc.).
In other words, advocating for defunding education also has to be accompanied by repealing laws that force allocation of money for certain programs or things. (And note that I’m not saying you’re inconsistent in that you don’t advocate for both positions; I’m just pointing out that cuts in funding need corresponding cuts in required spending.)
I think Renob is correct. The Kansas City Experiment clearly indicates so, as well. An Executive Summary:
I think it is safe to say that there is a minimum that needs to be spent on buildings and books, but the problem is cultural. When families and communities do not value education no amount of money will improver things.
Exactly my point. The amount of money spent per-student does not determine the sucess of a student. Money, in and of itself, does not predict student success. There are many factors at play. If you increase education spending you will not necessarily see an increase in student success.
I often wonder how much of that $/pupil spent figure is due to high staff salaries. here in boston, the public schools are burdened with superintendents, deputy superintendents, principles, asst. pronciples, teachers aides, etc. There seems to me more and more levels of management in the schools-what do these people do? incidentally, certain school districts do not accept federal aid-this makes them exempt from all the nonsense flowing from the federal DOE-these districts generally perform better!
Here’s the problrm with looking at the correlation between funding and educational performance: The confounding variables are extremely powerful.
For example, areas where schools get the most funding tend to be areas where the tax base can support it. But areas like that tend to be populated by educated, successful people. And one of the strongest correlations there is, is the correlation between student educational performance and their parent’s educational level. Another strong correlation is a stable family, which you also find more of in wealthier areas.
What you need to do to really see if funding matters is to set up an experiment where two schools in an area with a population in the same demographic cohort are given different funding levels, and the parents aren’t allowed to choose between them.
This is the real problem. Because if one school is better than another, it will attract the most motivated parents to it - the ones who were diligent enough to uncover that information, who interview the principal and research test scores, etc. These are exactly the kind of parents who are more likely to produce better-educated kids.
The same problem exists with private schools. Do private schools do a better job of educating kids? Or do they just tend to attract the kind of families that are more likely to produce better academic performers in the first place?
Consider Voyager’s example above. I haven’t had time to read the RAND study, but I’m going off of his stated conclusions - funding went down, and test scores dropped. But WHY did funding go down? Was it because most of the schools that have been opening in the past decade have been opening in poorer areas? If population growth is skewed to poorer areas because it’s mainly driven by poor immigrants and populations in poor areas who tend to have more children than populations in rich areas, then you would expect overall school funding to drop and for test scores to drop even if they were completely unrelated.
In Canada, the Fraser institute has published a very interesting report on academic freedom vs performance, and how it relates to funding. They ranked academic freedom in terms of choices available to parents - charter schools, private schools home schooling, and whether the regulatory environment leveled the playing field between the options so that parents were truly more free to choose the kind of schools they wanted their kids going to.
Then they compared this to the standardized testing scores across Canada.
Here’s a list of our provinces, ranked form most-free to least-free (all kids forced to go to public schools). Beside them is their rank in academic test scores:
Province Freedom Educational Score
AB 1 1
BC 2 2
QC 3 3
MB 4 4
ON 5 5
NB 6 5
NS 7 7
NF 8 8
SK 9 9
PE 10 10
You can see there is a 1:1 correlation between freedom to choose schools and educational performance. But maybe school funding is a confounding variable - after all, if parents are more free to send their kids to private schools, perhaps they spend more on education. Or perhaps the richest provinces are more likely to fund private schools. So here’s the table again, this time sorted by overall school funding:
Province Freedom Educational Score Spending/Student
ON 5 5 $7554
MB 4 4 $7432
QC 3 3 $7097
BC 2 2 $6985
AB 1 1 $6891
NB 6 5 $6433
SK 9 9 $6277
NF 8 8 $5841
NS 7 7 $5692
PE 10 10 $5677
There’s still a correlation between funding and performance, but it’s much weaker. In fact, there’s an inverse correlation in the top five provinces. Among those five, the ones who spend less do better than the ones who spend more.
There are some other interesting tables in the report. One of them measures teacher/student ratios against performance. Alberta, which is the best performing province, has the worst teacher/student ratio, with 18.43 students per teacher. The province with the best, at only 14.29 students per teacher, was Newfoundland, and it was third from the bottom in test scores.
What about other population differences? Ontario and Alberta have almost the same per-capita income, yet Ontario scores significantly worse, and is only the middle of the pack.
The inverse correlation between spending and performance in the top five is interesting. I wonder if it’s because there’s a mistaken assumption that more funding will improve schools, and therefore provinces who do worse tend to throw more money at the problem? I think it could also be the fact that the ones who spend less are the ones that are more free, which means their education systems are simply more efficient. They’re better at figuring out what works and what doesn’t, and targeting their educational dollars accordingly. If you’re convinced that teacher/student ratios are the holy grail of education, as many legislators seem to be, then that’s what you’re going to do to try to improve scores, and that’s a very expensive way to improve education. Especially if the real solution turns out to be something more mundane like better class discipline or a school’s ability to kick out bad students, which forces parents to work harder to help their kids achieve or go through the pain of relocating their child to a more distant school.
If there was a direct correlation between funding and preformance, NH would not score above the national average across the board. We’re 50th in educational funding (at least on the state level, local funding varies so wildly that the average/student on the NAEP site is virtually meaningless), but rank in the top 1/3rd in test scores, or so ranked by that Smartest States site.
More money is often just more money to spend foolishly.
Another factor exisits that I was unaware of until I began teaching public school: there is a great deal of, for want of a better term, “soft money” floating around some schools. My moderately-sized urban high school takes in well over six figures a year in private donations; this doesn’t even touch the money made through activity-specific fundraisers (which can be huge!) as well as in informal gifts (i.e, the richer parents of girls on the drill team informally and annomously fund the girls with fewer resources; the secratary of the counseling office has been know to pay, herself, to overnight applications in for kids who get them in late; hell, I’ve annonmously paid for more than one student’s AP exams.) Just the stuff I know about–and these things tend to be done very quietly–adds up to a considerable amount.
Not every school in my large urban school district has anywhere near this level of “soft money”: we are fortunate enough to have a signifigant number of our kids come from very affluent families, many of whom graduated from our same school (though the “neighborhood kids”, as they are euphemistically known, are a small percentage of the student body). In some schools, no one’s parents have the resources to donate. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we are one of the strongest schools in the district. What I don’t know is the same problem that keeps coming up–is all that money a symptom of the same parental involvement that leads to a strong school–and helps all students, even the ones without involved parents–or does it help, in and of itself, raise the quality of the education we offer?
As a side note, the amount of “soft money” in public schools is dwarfed by the amount in private schools: you send your kids to an elite private school, in addition to the 14-20K a year you pay in tution, you are expected to make signifigant contribututions. I have no idea if the money from these sources is included in the price-per-pupil numbers given by private schools.
Sam: That ‘spending per student’ variable is unclear. I assume it means among students who get funding, not all students within a province.
The problem with directly comparing funding-per-pupil with test score performance is that it neglects private school kids. Districts with higher average incomes might spend more on public schools while rich parents simply take their high-performing kids to private schools. I suspect your numbers would be different if they included that fact.
The report says the funding numbers come from Statistics Canada (2002), “School Board Revenues and Expenditures.” I would take that to mean both private and public schools, but I don’t know how home schooling would be figured into that.
Don’t school boards usually just deal with the public schools?
In Canada, the seperate school system is publically funded. When you do your taxes, you declare your religious affiliation. If you’re Catholic, your money goes to the Catholic school system. Alberta funds Charter schools to some degree, and it also offers funding to some extent for home schooling. So I don’t know where the line in the sand is drawn.
The teacher/student ratio is more interesting, because we keep hearing how important that is to educational results. Yet the Canadian data shows, if anything, a negative correlation. I wonder how much of that ‘teacher/student ratio’ thing is spin coming from the teacher’s unions? Obviously, they have a vested in interest in anything that reduces the number of kids they have to look after and increases employment for teachers.
I’d be interesting in seeing any U.S. statistics on students per teacher and how it affects educational performance.
Cite?
It may be that way in Alberta, but certainly not in BC.
In BC, local taxes go to the public school board and the provincial education budget is split between public and private schools(the lion’s share goes to public schools).
From the 2006 budget
As well, there is no line on any of the tax forms (federal or provincial (bc)) to put your religous affilliation. BC tax forms
To answer David, in BC at least, public school boards are not responsible for private schools. Private schools are still responsible for following guidlines from the provinical ministry of education.
!!!
What about private schools with no religious affiliation? Are there any? And do they get any public funding?
Hmmn… Maybe it’s not the tax form. But we definitely get a form that we fill out that tells the government whether our taxes should go to the private or public school system. I filled one out last year. Maybe it was our property taxes.