Two recent studies take the topic of school funding and achievement head on, and they conclude that more money improves student achievement, and even boosts earning power after graduation. According to the studies, the results are strongest for children from low income families. It looks like “throwing money at schools,” as critics like to typify spending increases, pushes students forward.
Results of studies on education are always worth questioning because it’s so hard to run a controlled study. Children aren’t genetically similar lab rats; every child is unique in nature and nurture. And you can’t separate children into neat control groups and experimental groups. So researchers have to do their best to pull results from messy, real-world education data.
One group of researchers spent decades using a set of student data to “prove” that class size doesn’t affect learning. Then another group of researchers took the same data set and created a convincing argument that lowering class size actually does improve student achievement. For years, education researchers on the conservative end of the spectrum have “proven” that you don’t get any bang for added education bucks. When they’re being more cautious, they say there’s no evidence that increasing funding has any positive effects. Now, some researchers have created two high quality studies which indicate the opposite. Like all studies of this kind, the results aren’t take-it-to-the-bank certain, but these are pretty damn robust. The two studies are summarized here, with links to longer discussions by the studies’ authors.
The studies take advantage of the fact that since 1990, 26 states changed their school funding and 23 others left theirs alone. That allowed them to compare changes in student achievement in districts with increased funding to districts where funding didn’t change.
The problem is, how do you compare student achievement? One group of researchers used the NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) exam which has been given to a national sample of students since the 1970s and is considered the most valid and reliable standardized test there is by educators across the political spectrum. The researchers were able to look at individual student scores in districts they were comparing so they could match up students who were similar in terms of race and income. The result was, student scores in districts with added funding increased more than those in districts where funding stayed the same.
If the authors have it right, more money for schools with low income students means a significant improvement in achievement.
A second study looks at longer term effects of increased funding. It concludes that a 10 percent funding increase in schools with mostly low income students results in a 10 percent increase in graduation, 10 percent higher wages and a 6 percent reduction in the incidence of adult poverty. The changes in schools with higher income students aren’t as large.
Assuming the studies are accurate, what does that mean here in Arizona? A 10 percent boost in funding would come to about $750 million, close to Ed Supe Diane Douglas’ recommendation for a $680 million increase. True, that’s a serious chunk of change, but let’s put it into perspective. Right now we’re 49th in the nation in per student funding. The added $750 million would leapfrog us over Oklahoma, all the way up to 48th place. To equal 47th place Mississippi, we’d have to add another $150 million to the pot. Who knows, maybe, since we’re at the bottom of the funding barrel and have such a long way to go to make a significant move upward, we’d get even better results if we added, say, 20 percent.
If the second study is accurate, we’d get the biggest bang for our added bucks by putting the extra money into districts with more low income kids and not worrying about high rent districts like Catalina Foothills and Vail. That might not go over so well with our more well-heeled citizens, but if they’re into saving some money, the studies indicate that scrimping on their kids’ educations is the way to go.
An It’s-Not-What-You-Spend-It’s-How-You-Spend-It Note: A favorite argument of the “Don’t throw money at education” crowd is, the amount of money a district receives is less important than how they spend it. One of their favorite distractions is focusing on how much of the total budget makes it into the classroom. That’s important, sure, but a little basic number crunching shows how misleading the classroom funding comparison can be. What I find interesting about the two studies is, they don’t consider how money was spent in the districts, only if districts increased their funding, and they find more money led to positive results. It looks like just “throwing” money at educators (“Heads up, catch!”) and letting them figure out how to use it to benefit their students does a whole lot more good than finding a reason to deny them the money.
This article appears in Dec 22-28, 2016.
$70.7B in the budget for US DOE for fiscal year 2016. Seventy point seven billion dollars.
$70,700,000,000
There has to be a point at which we can ask, “how much is too much?”
I am there.
http://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/obama-2016-budget-seeks-expand-educational-opportunity-all-students
Yup. Better hand your friend HT some more money. He might be able to start more day care centers that lose $8 million with funds that should be going into K-12. That will definitely improve NAEP outcomes locally, right, David?
There are a lot of problems with the conclusions you draw from your data but what’s the point of listing them? You will continue doing what you do, which is never affected by incoming data or observations made at the ground level or arguments that don’t correspond to the same tired, invalid or irrelevant points you’ve made time after time.
What are you accomplishing? The AZ legislature won’t listen to you. The voters who select leadership either won’t listen to you, or if they do, they won’t have enough power to put the legislators you recommend into the majority.
If you want to do something that might have a beneficial effect on educational outcomes, pick up the phone and give your friends Adelita and Kristel a call. Tell them that you can’t and won’t defend Sanchez’s BS any more, and they’d better join with the 3 Board members who will NOT rubber stamp his nonsense, going forward, and give him his pink slip in the January 2017 Board meeting before he does any more damage to our children, our teachers, and our schools.
Politics and scheisse in comments so far. We should have the guts to admit that AZ is right down there with Mississippi when it comes to funding better schools for kids. You can’t really compare AZ with US totals because AZ drags down the average, purposefully.
Very interesting opinion piece. I only with that David had listed his data sources so that a reader could research them.
On a different but related subject, after numerous trips to the Legislature advocating for education funding, I am absolutely convinced that data, results, facts mean absolutely noting to the ideology driven members of our legislature. “Cut taxes at all cost” seems to be the recurring mantra down there.
ITs interesting that the same data produces such different conclusions on the class-size issue. It should be obvious to all that a good education is helped by more money–AND that the way the district spends money has everything to do with that. The last sentence SHOULD read “It looks like just “throwing” money at educators (“Heads up, catch!”) and letting them figure out how to use it to benefit their students does a whole lot more good….than throwing it at administrators”. The top dog makes 1/2 million a year and teachers are eligible for WIC benefits, but they can’t seem to get the administration to actually give them their performance bonuses, as its apparently more important to balance the budget with the surplus funds. I don’t think, in this parallel universe, that there’s any point in assuming that “educators” covers TUSD Administration. The top dog will never get the legislature to cut more money to his school district when its own mismanagement is so flagrant.
Sunriser:
FYI “politics” affects the quality of education delivered to our students and it affects educational outcomes. In TUSD, a district serving between 40,000 and 50,000 students locally, for the last four years an irresponsible Board majority has wasted literally millions of dollars. They voted to accept a compensation package their Superintendent wrote for himself and paid out close to $500K of our tax dollars to him during the previous school year, including somewhere in the neighborhood of $40K in compensation for somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 “unused vacation days.” This while starting teacher salaries in the district are between $30K and $40K and pay and conditions in the district are so bad that at last report there were still more than 100 permanent full time teaching positions unfilled.
The Superintendent in this district has botched administration of the schools in so many ways it would be difficult to list them all here and those of us who’ve had the misfortune to have children enrolled in TUSD during this period have seen a marked deterioration in the functioning level of the schools over the past three school years since this man took over.
Since you are concerned about funding, I will mention:
He voluntarily gave more than $3 million in desegregation funds back to taxpayers in a district where there are many needs that could be covered by desegregation funds that are going unmet.
http://tucson.com/news/local/education/sanchez-things-are-looking-up-at-tusd/article_d0af6813-b60f-584d-ab04-5169d8442416.html
This at the same time that he picked needless legal fights with the desegregation authority and radically increased the amount of money going to pay lawyers rather than to help students in the schools.
http://tucson.com/news/local/columnists/steller/steller-tusd-should-take-judge-s-hint-stop-costly-fighting/article_058a6a68-b32f-5c10-b684-3c9f71cb0a1c.html
The 301 money that should be going in bonuses to teachers and might have helped retain some of the hundreds who have resigned during his tenure have been stockpiled in district bank accounts and not dispensed to teachers.
http://tucson.com/news/local/columnists/steller/tim-steller-tusd-teachers-money-balanced-district-s-books/article_89ba1255-1cde-51a2-9e24-f05bd0464df0.html
He wasted a lot of money on starting “day care” programs that in addition to drawing much needed $$$ off of K-12, which is the proper mission of a public school district.
http://tucson.com/news/local/education/tusd-preschool-programs-nearly-in-debt/article_80215b17-f697-5149-852c-ea532f685ddf.html
It may be true, as Safier reports in this piece, the overall national educational outcomes tend to be correlated with overall higher funding rates, but that does not mean that increased funding necessarily CAUSES better outcomes, as has been pointed out many times in these comment streams. It may mean, for example, that populations that value and support education and children enough to select politicians willing to fund the schools at a higher level are also doing a lot of other things (overseeing their schools better, recruiting better qualified central administrators, maintaining better social safety nets for women and children, offering more community and parental support, etc.) that contribute to improved outcomes in ways that this broad-brush study does not track and record. It is quite possible that you could increase education funding in one locale and if you did not at the same time alter these other related causal factors, you would not improve outcomes.
Whatever the case, those who have watched TUSD, our largest local school district, for the past three years know that unless the district’s management is changed, increasing funding to the district has little chance of improving services to students. That is simply a FACT that Safier has repeatedly avoided acknowledging, in these pieces and others (if you follow these links, make sure to read the comment streams as well as what Safier has written):
http://www.tucsonweekly.com/TheRange/archives/2015/03/30/sen-steve-farley-this-is-not-your-fathers-tusd
http://www.tucsonweekly.com/TheRange/archives/2015/11/23/recent-tusd-decisions-the-good-the-bad-and-the-arrogant
http://www.tucsonweekly.com/TheRange/archives/2015/11/24/segregation-and-desegregation-tusd-schools-and-tucson-charter-schools
http://m.tucsonweekly.com/TheRange/archives/2016/10/12/my-picks-for-the-tusd-school-board-cam-juarez-kristel-foster-betts-putnam-hidalgo
Ok, I can get it. Lots of stuff about these “politics” makes sense in a specific sort of way. But TUSD does not represent all of the United States. TUSD certainly does not fairly represent nearly every other school district in AZ. The TUSD I read about here in comments is a pinata that gets bashed and battered relentlessly, with rarely a mention of anything ever good or of any good kids or of decent, hardworking teachers or of any schools anywhere that are safe and productive. There is a big forest of public school districts in our land and TUSD is one tree. AZ is usually close to 50 when funding of schools as measured state by state and I think that is worse than TUSD.
Thanks for the response, Sunriser.
TUSD is the second largest school district in the state of Arizona.
The most recent enrollment data available on the Department of Education website seem to indicate that total enrollment in Pima County public schools is somewhere in the neighborhood of 150,000.
http://www.azed.gov/research-evaluation/arizona-enrollment-figures/
TUSD’s enrollment, though it has dropped significantly in the last decade, was at last report still between 47,000 and 48,000.
http://www.tucsonweekly.com/TheRange/archives/2016/07/27/tusd-enrollment-2000-to-2016
That means that when we’re talking about school funding in Pima County, the second most populous county in the state (after Maricopa), whether TUSD applied the money it receives in a way that supports student well-being and student achievement is something that affects approximately 1 of 3 students enrolled in public schools in Pima County. Total enrollment in the state is just over 1,000,000. So TUSD handles the education of 1 in 20 students in the state of Arizona.
When it comes to how well TUSD is able, as the district with the highest (desegregation-augmented) per-pupil funding in the region, to help their 1-in-3 Pima County students and their 1-in-20 Arizona students perform academically, this district-by-district AZ-Merit score breakdown, which shows TUSD coming in 8th out of the 9 Southern Arizona districts listed, is one indication:
http://tucson.com/thisistucson/schools/two-thirds-of-tucson-students-fail-azmerit-for-second-year/article_a6dd106a-7c38-11e6-8aea-c796abf7c27d.html
I hope the various data provided above make it clear that TUSD is not just “a tree in the forest.” Because of its size, it is a public institution whose functionality (or dys-functionality) has a disproportionate affect on the region — on our economy and the quality of our communities generally. Also on the criminal justice and social service systems and how much public $$$ we spend on individuals whose education never gave them a proper chance to learn a trade or profession.
Have you ever seen state-by-state per-pupil funding presented in a way that relates it to differences in cost of living in the different states? Or differences in average income levels? Or different %s of funding granted in each state that goes into teacher salaries? Or teacher retention rates in various states? Those would be interesting data to look at, but when people talk about Arizona’s ranking in school funding, they never seem to mention those data. I wonder why.
In Safier’s case, it seems likely that he begs funds for “public schools” — often using state-by-state funding breakdowns that tug at the heartstrings of those who care about kids and education — in part because he has close ties with the politicians running TUSD, who receive a large portion of the benefit of any across-the-board funding increases that public district schools in Pima County receive. To put it bluntly, making these “increased funding to schools” arguments is a way of feeding the political machine with which Safier affiliates, a machine that, though it involves itself in public school governance, has through the decades demonstrated precious little concern for using money it receives for education to achieve real, documentable student benefit.
When it comes to what we can do as citizens that will ACTUALLY help the students in our region, the agenda Safier puts forward is an out-and-out scam. What will help? Firing a malfeasant, ignorant, greedy Superintendent recruited and excused by the political machine Safier’s friends run, and, after that is achieved, continuing to track and report whether the money TUSD receives is applied is ways that help 1/3 of the students in Pima County and 1/20 of the students in the state. It is possible to apply education funding in ways that DO improve students’ educations, but it can’t be done without public oversight and public pressure to make sure it gets done.