Explanation/FormatThis activity challenges students to use the Toulmin model to improve their debating. It requires that they master a nuanced debate about school funding.

1. Each student will be assigned one note card based on their number on the lab roster. The number on the card corresponds to a piece of evidence in this file. Students with an affirmative card will receive a green note card and students with a negative card will receive a pink note card.

3. Working independently, students should identify every potential grounding in their assigned card. These can include facts, data, observations, or even the mere existence of a statement. They should write any and all grounding that they believe can be derived from their evidence on the back of their note card. We will do the first card together as a group so you know what you are doing.

4. Students will divide into two teams: one affirmative and one negative. Each team should select a captain. This person will debate on behalf of the team.

5. Teams will be given 15 minutes to prepare for a debate on the resolution listed below.

6. Students will be allowed to use only their team’s notecards and one sheet of blank paper to prepare and deliver their speeches. They may also flow on a separate sheet of paper. When making arguments, students may not directly quote evidence.

7. After 15 minutes of prep time, the instructor will conduct a note card draft. The affirmative gets the first pick. They may select one and only one note card to enter into the record of the debate. The negative then gets their first pick. This process proceeds until both teams have selected six cards.

8. As part of the draft, each team is given one “veto” card. They may play it at any time. When played, it vetoes the other team’s last choice and requires them to choose a new card. The veto card must be played immediately after the opposing team’s draft pick is announced. If a card is vetoed, it may not be re-drafted.

9. After the conclusion of the draft, the negative team will play their “balance personnel” card. This allows them to steal five members of the affirmative team. They will name those students one by one. Those students will move over to the negative team. The affirmative will be given a block card that allows them to block one (and only one) student from being drafted. They must play this card immediately after the negative announces one of its picks. If this occurs, the negative must choose someone else to fill that slot. The “balance personnel” card may not be used on the affirmative’s team captain.

10. Once teams are balanced, both teams will be given an additional 10 minutes of prep time to finish preparing for the debate. It will then proceed as follows:

1AC — 4 minutes

CX of 1AC — 2 minutes

1NC — 5 minutes

CX of 1NC — 2 minutes

1AR — 2 minutes

NR — 3 minutes

2AR — 2 minutes

11. After the debate, we will discuss the arguments and scrutinize both teams’ use of the Toulmin Model to construct credible arguments grounded in evidence.

The ResolutionResolved: A substantial increase in per-pupil spending for elementary and secondary education in the United States will substantially improve student outcomes.

Affirmative Evidence1. Increased funding is vital to improve schools — the best research confirms. Baker 17 — Bruce D. Baker, Professor in the Department of Educational Theory, Policy, and Administration in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, former Associate Professor of Teaching and Leadership at the University of Kansas, holds an Ed.D. in Organization and Leadership from the Teachers College of Columbia University, 2017 (“Does Money Matter in Education? Second Edition,” Albert Shanker Institute, Available Online at http://www.shankerinstitute.org/sites/shanker/files/moneymatters_edition2.pdf, Accessed 06-14-2017, p. 1-2)Executive Summary This second edition policy brief revisits the long and storied literature on whether money matters in providing a quality education . It includes research released since the original brief in 2012 and

covers a handful of additional topics. Increasingly, political rhetoric adheres to the unfounded certainty that money doesn’t make a difference in education, and that reduced funding is unlikely to harm educational quality. Such proclamations have even been used to justify large cuts to

education budgets over the past few years. These positions, however, have little basis in the empirical research on the relationship between funding and school quality.In the following brief, I discuss major studies on three specific topics: (a) whether how much money schools spend matters; (b) whether specific schooling resources that cost money matter; and (c) whether substantive and sustained state school finance reforms matter. Regarding these three questions, I conclude:Does Money Matter?Yes . On average, aggregate measures of per-pupil spending are positively associated with improved or higher student outcomes . The size of this effect is larger in some studies than in others, and, in some cases, additional funding appears to matter more for some students than for others. Clearly, there are other factors that may moderate the influence of funding on student outcomes, such as how that money is spent. In other words, money must be spent wisely to yield benefits. But, on balance, in direct tests of the relationship between financial resources and student outcomes, money matters.

Do Schooling Resources That Cost Money Matter?Yes . Schooling resources that cost money , including smaller class sizes, additional supports, early childhood programs and more competitive teacher compensation (permitting schools and districts to recruit and retain a higher-quality teacher workforce), are positively associated with student outcomes. Again, in some cases, those effects are larger

than in others, and there is also variation by student population and other contextual variables. On the whole, however, the things that cost money benefit students, and there is scarce evidence that there are more cost-effective alternatives.

Do State School Finance Reforms Matter?Yes . Sustained improvements to the level and distribution of funding across local public school districts can lead to

improvements in the level and distribution of student outcomes . While money alone may not be the answer, more equitable and adequate allocation of financial inputs to schooling provide a necessary underlying condition for improving the equity and adequacy of outcomes. The available evidence suggests that appropriate combinations of more adequate funding with more accountability for its use may be most promising. [end page 1]While there may in fact be better and more efficient ways to leverage the education dollar toward improved student outcomes, we do know the following:• Many of the ways in which schools currently spend money do improve student outcomes.

• When schools have more money, they have greater opportunity to spend productively. When they don’t, they can’t.

• Arguments that across-the-board budget cuts will not hurt outcomes are completely unfounded .

In short, money matters , resources that cost money matter , and a more equitable distribution of school funding can improve outcomes . Policymakers would be well-advised to rely on high-quality research to guide the critical choices they make regarding school finance .

2. Increased funding substantially improves student outcomes — best methodology. JJP 16 — C. Kirabo Jackson, Associate Professor of Human Development and Social Policy at Northwestern University, Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research, Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University, et al., with Rucker C. Johnson, Associate Professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California-Berkeley, Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, Faculty Research Fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University, Research Affiliate at the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan, Research Affiliate at the Institute for Poverty Research at the University of Wisconsin, holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Michigan, and Claudia Persico, Assistant Professor of the Economics of Education in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis and Faculty Affiliate of the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Research Affiliate at Northwestern University, holds a Ph.D. in Human Development and Social Policy from the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University, 2016 (“The Effects of School Spending on Educational and Economic Outcomes: Evidence From School Finance Reforms,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 131, Issue 1, February, Available Online at http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~ruckerj/QJE_resubmit_final_version.pdf, Accessed 07-06-2017, p. 212-213)VII. Discussion and ConclusionsPrevious national studies correlated observed school resources with student outcomes and found little association for those born after 1950 (e.g., Coleman et al. 1966; Hanushek 1986; Betts 1995; Grogger 1996). This study builds and improves on previous work by using nationally representative, individual-level panel data from birth to adulthood (matched with school spending and reform data) and quasi-experimental methods to estimate credible causal relationships. We investigate the causal effect of exogenous school spending increases (induced by the passage of SFRs) on educational attainment and

(eventual) labor market success. For children from low-income

families, increasing per pupil spending yields large improvements in educational attainment, wages, family income, and reductions in the annual incidence of adult poverty. All of these effects are statistically significant and are robust to a rich set of controls for confounding policies and trends. For children from nonpoor families, we find smaller effects of increased school spending on subsequent educational attainment and family income in adulthood. The results make

important contributions to the human capital literature and highlight how improved access to school resources can profoundly shape the life outcomes of economically disadvantaged children , and thereby significantly reduce the intergenerational transmission of poverty.To explore the potential mechanisms from which these spending effects arise, we documented that reform-induced school spending increases were associated with sizable improvements in measured school inputs , including reductions in student-teacher ratios , increases in teacher salaries , and longer school years .31 These finding parallel those of Card and Krueger’s influential 1992 study of males born between

1920 and 1949 and recent studies that link adult outcomes to quasi-experimental variation in school inputs (Fredriksson et al. 2012). The similarities suggest that money still matters, and so do school resources.

A suggestive benefit-cost analysis reveals that investments in school spending are worthwhile. Increasing spending by 10% for all school-age years increased wages by 7.7% each year (Table IV). Someone born in 1975 would start school around [end page 212] 1980 when average per pupil spending was $5,459 in 2013 dollars. A 10% increase for 12 years starting in 1980 is equal to $4,850 in present value (assuming a 6% discount rate). The median worker in 2013 earned $28,031, so a 7.2% increase in earnings for such a worker between ages 25 and 60 is worth just over $10,000 in present value. This implies a benefit-cost ratio of about 3 and an internal rate of return of roughly 10% . This internal rate of return is similar to those estimated for preschool programs (Deming 2009), smaller than estimates of the internal rates of return for class size reductions (Fredriksson et al. 2012), and larger than long-term returns to stocks. In sum, the estimated benefits to increased school spending are large enough to justify the increased spending under most reasonable benefit-cost calculations.

3. Historical trends support our conclusion. JJP 16 — C. Kirabo Jackson, Associate Professor of Human Development and Social Policy at Northwestern University, Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research, Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University, et al., with Rucker C. Johnson, Associate Professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California-Berkeley, Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, Faculty Research Fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University, Research Affiliate at the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan, Research Affiliate at the Institute for Poverty Research at

the University of Wisconsin, holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Michigan, and Claudia Persico, Assistant Professor of the Economics of Education in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis and Faculty Affiliate of the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Research Affiliate at Northwestern University, holds a Ph.D. in Human Development and Social Policy from the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University, 2016 (“The Effects of School Spending on Educational and Economic Outcomes: Evidence From School Finance Reforms,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 131, Issue 1, February, Available Online at http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~ruckerj/QJE_resubmit_final_version.pdf, Accessed 07-06-2017, p. 213-214)Given that school spending levels have risen significantly since the 1970s, our results might lead one to expect to have seen improved outcomes for children from low-income families , and

indeed, other research suggests this occurred over the relevant time period. For example, Krueger (1998) documents test score increases over time, with large improvements for disadvantaged children from poor urban areas.32 The CPS shows declining dropout rates since 1975 for those from

the lowest income quartile (NCES 2012). Murnane (2013) finds that high school completion rates have been increasing since 1970 with larger increases for black and Hispanic students; Baum, Ma, and Payea

(2013) find that postsecondary enrollment rates have been increasing since the 1980s, particularly for those from poor families. Our results suggest increased school spending may have played a key role .Given that per pupil spending roughly doubled between 1970 and 2000,

our point estimates might lead one to expect much greater convergence in outcomes across income groups. To help explain this, we point to studies documenting countervailing forces such as increased residential segregation by income (Reardon and Bischoff 2011;

Watson 2009; Owens 2015), [end page 213] increases in single-parent families

(Guryan, Hurst, and Kearney 2008; Waldfogel, Craigie, and Brooks-Gunn 2010), the crack epidemic (Evans, Garthwaite, and Moore 2012; Fryer et al. 2013), and mass incarceration (Raphael and Stoll 2009; Kearney et al. 2014). All of these forces tend to have large deleterious effects on those from low-income families . It is therefore likely that any positive school spending effects were offset by deteriorating conditions for low-income children in other dimensions . Aside from these countervailing forces, our evidence suggests that exogenous spending increases went toward more productive inputs than endogenous spending increases. Accordingly, our results predict that the effect of endogenous aggregate increases in school spending will be smaller than those implied by our estimates. Finally, we point out that we find that a 25% increase in per pupil spending throughout the school-age years could eliminate the attainment gaps between children from low-income and nonpoor families . This is a sizable effect . However, to put this effect size into perspective, the average family income was $31,925 for those from low-income families and $72,029 for those from nonpoor families, whereas in 2011 the 10th percentile of family income was $9,478 and the 90th percentile was

$113,868 (all in 2000 dollars). The spending differences necessary to eliminate outcome difference between children from families at the 90th and the 10th percentiles of family income or between children from the poorest and the richest families are likely much larger than those we examine in our study. For all these reasons, the moderate convergence in outcomes across income groups observed over time in the aggregate are compatible with the magnitude of our estimated spending effects.After Coleman et al. (1966), many have questioned whether money matters, and whether increased school spending can improve the lifetime outcomes of children from disadvantaged backgrounds. Our findings show that increased per pupil spending induced by state SFR

policies did improve student outcomes and helped reduce the intergenerational transmission of poverty . Increased school funding alone may not guarantee improved outcomes, but our findings indicate that provision of adequate funding may be a necessary condition. Importantly, we find that how the money is spent may be important.

As such, to be most effective it is likely that spending increases should be coupled with systems that help ensure spending is allocated toward the most productive inputs.

4. Claims that “money doesn’t matter” are unethical and wrong. Baker 17 — Bruce D. Baker, Professor in the Department of Educational Theory, Policy, and Administration in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, former Associate Professor of Teaching and Leadership at the University of Kansas, holds an Ed.D. in Organization and Leadership from the Teachers College of Columbia University, 2017 (“Does Money Matter in Education? Second Edition,” Albert Shanker Institute, Available Online at http://www.shankerinstitute.org/sites/shanker/files/moneymatters_edition2.pdf, Accessed 06-14-2017, p. 15-19)Summing Up The EvidenceThis brings me to a summary of the evidence on whether money matters in education. Despite the relative consistency of empirical findings over time regarding (a) whether per-pupil spending itself is related to student outcomes; (b) whether spending-related resources, such as teacher wages and class sizes, are related to student outcomes; and (c) whether improving the adequacy and equity of school funding can have positive effects on student outcomes, a persistent cloud of doubt hangs over political deliberations on school funding. Here, I review briefly the sources of that doubt, relative to what we do know with some confidence as well as what we still have yet to figure out about money and student outcomes.Main sources of doubtThe primary source of doubt to this day remains the above-mentioned Eric

Hanushek finding in 1986 that “there appears to be no strong or systematic relationship between school expenditures and student performance.”117 This single quote, now divorced entirely from the soundly refuted analyses on which it was based, remains a mantra for those wishing to deny that increased funding for schools is a viable option for improving school quality. Add to this statement the occasional uninformative and inflammatory anecdote regarding urban district spending and student outcomes in places

like Kansas City or New Jersey, or the frequently re-created graphs showing spending and achievement over the past few decades, and one

has a rhetorical war against an otherwise overwhelming body of empirical evidence.118

While research evidence regarding the importance of funding and specific schooling resources for improving student outcomes has become clearer with time, Hanushek and a [end page 15] handful of peers have become even more entrenched in their views , as reflected in recent public testimony. Rhetoric among detractors has continued to drift from the cloud of doubt to a rock of certainty. That is, certainty that money has little or no role in improving school quality, and that school finance reforms that infuse additional funds only lead to greater inefficiency, having little or no effect on either equity or adequacy of schooling. Notably, Hanushek asserts (now and then) that it’s not that money doesn’t matter at all, but rather that additional money doesn’t matter on top of the already high levels of spending that currently exist across all U.S. schools.To summarize, the current dogma of Hanushek includes the following core tenets:1. Because schools already spend so much and do so with such great inefficiency, additional funding is unlikely to lead to improved student outcomes.2. How money is used matters much more than how much money is spent.3. Differences in the amount of money some schools have than others are inconsequential, since those with less may simply make smarter spending decisions.According the recent rhetoric of Hanushek, these principles are ironclad. In his own words, they are “conventional wisdom” on which “virtually all analysts” agree. They are “commonly believed,” “overall truth” and backed by an “enormous amount of scientific analysis,” “substantial econometric evidence” and “considerable prior research.” For example, in the winter of 2015, in the context of school funding litigation in New York state, Hanushek opined:

“An enormous amount of scientific analysis has focused on how spending and resources of schools relates to student outcomes. It is now commonly believed that spending on schools is not systematically related to student outcomes.”119

Yet, the enormous amount of scientific analysis to which Hanushek referred in his expert testimony was primarily referenced to a 2003 summary of much of his prior work from the 1980s , work which has been discredited on numerous occasions , 120 including by research produced in the last 12 years. Similarly, in the same context (Maisto v. State of New York), Hanushek proclaims:

“There has been substantial econometric evidence that supports this lack of relationship.”Hanushek again backs his claims with the same short list of dated self-citation.121 In an even more recent attempt to rebut a new, major study finding positive effects of school finance reforms,122 Hanushek (2015) makes the following version of the same claim:

“Considerable prior research has failed to find a consistent relationship between school spending and student performance, making skepticism about such a relationship the conventional wisdom.”123

This time, he anchored that claim only to his 2003 piece (by hyperlink to the “prior research” phrase) on the failure of input-based schooling policies, 124 choosing to ignore entirely the considerably larger body of more rigorous work I summarize in my 2012 review on the topic.The extension of these claims that nearly everyone agrees there’s no clear relationship between spending and student performance is the assertion that there is broad agreement that how money is spent matters far more than how much money is available. As phrased by Hanushek in the context of New York state school finance litigation:

“Virtually all analysts now realize that how money is spent is much more important than how much is spent.”125As with the prior declarations, this one is made with the exceedingly bold assertion that virtually all analysts agree on this point—without reference to any empirical evidence to that point (a seemingly gaping omission for a decidedly empirical claim about a supposedly empirical truth). Further, “how money is spent” is constrained by whether sufficient money is there to begin with. While common sense dictates that how money is spent clearly matters, thus making this part of the statement widely agreeable, this does not preclude the relevance of how much money is available to spend.Perhaps most disconcerting is that Hanushek has recently extended this argument to declare that equity gaps in funding, or measures of them, aren’t an important policy concern either. Specifically, Hanushek proclaims:

“It also underscores how calculations of equity gaps in spending, of costs needed to achieve equity, or of costs needed to obtain some level of student performance are vacuous, lacking any scientific basis” (p. 4).126

Put differently, what Hanushek is opining by declaring calculations of equity gaps to be

vacuous and lacking scientific basis is that it matters not whether one school or district has more resources than another. Regardless of any spending differences, schools and districts can provide equitable education—toward equitable outcome goals. Those with substantively fewer resources simply need to be more efficient. Since all public schools and districts are presently so inefficient, achieving these efficiency gains through more creative personnel policies, such as performance-based pay and dismissal of “bad teachers,” is easily attainable.Of course, even if we assume that creative personnel policies yield marginal improvements to efficiency, if schools with varied levels of resources pursued these strategies [end page 16] with comparable efficiency gains, inequities would remain constant. Requiring those with less to simply be more efficient with what they have is an inequitable requirement. This argument is often linked in

popular media and the blogosphere with the popular book and film Moneyball, which asserts that clever statistical analysis for selecting high-productivity, undervalued players was the basis for the (short-lived) success in 2002 and 2003 of the low-payroll Oakland Athletics baseball team. The flaws of this analogy are too many to explore thoroughly herein, but the biggest flaw is illustrated by the oft-ignored subtitle of the book: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game . That is, gaining a leg up through clever player selection is necessary in baseball because vast wealth and payroll differences across teams make baseball an unfair game. The public’s interest in providing equitable and adequate funding for education is likely greater than ensuring equitable and adequate baseball payrolls. Put more bluntly,

the education of present and future generations should not be an unfair game.

From judges to scholars , critics of Hanushek have characterized his evidence as “ facile ,” based on “ fuzzy logic ,” 127 and “ weak and factually tenuous .” 128 Two recurring examples used by Hanushek to illustrate the unimportance of funding increases for improving outcomes are the “long-term trend” or “time trend” argument and anecdotal claims of the failures of input-based reforms in New Jersey. Baker and Welner (2011) tackle in depth the fallacies of Hanushek’s New Jersey claims.129 Here, I point to Hanushek’s own, albeit facile, unacknowledged self-debunking of his New Jersey claims. But first, I address the long-term trend claim.Again, from recent testimony in New York state, Hanushek provides the following exposition of the long-term trend assertion:

“The overall truth of this disconnect of spending and outcomes is easiest to see by looking at the aggregate data for the United States over the past half century. Since 1960, pupil-teacher ratios fell by one-third, teachers with master’s degrees over doubled, and median teacher experience grew significantly (Chart 1).4 Since these three factors are the most important determinants of spending per pupil, it leads to the quadrupling of spending between 1960 and 2009 (after adjusting for inflation). At the same time, plotting scores for math and reading performance of 17-year-olds on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP, or “The Nation’s Report Card”) shows virtually no change since 1970 (Charts 2 and 3).5”130

This claim, like many of Hanushek’s, is made with language of astounding certainty—the “overall truth” as it exists in the mind of Hanushek. This claim is commonly accompanied by graphs showing per-pupil spending going up over time, pupil-to-teacher ratios going down and national assessment scores appearing relatively flat, much of which is achieved via the smoke and mirrors of representing spending and outcome data on completely different scales, and via the failure to adjust appropriately for the changing costs and related obligations of the public education system and for the changing demography of the tested population.131 Oversimplified visuals are used to make the proclamation that student achievement shows “virtually no change,” a statement discredited on closer inspection.132 Jackson, Johnson and Persico (2015) provide additional examples of how such facile analyses lead to fallacious conclusions.133As explained by Baker and Welner (2011),134 Hanushek for years has cited the failures of New Jersey’s school finance reforms as the basis for why other states should not increase funding to high-poverty schools. In litigation in Kansas in 2011, Hanushek proclaimed:

“The dramatic spending increases called for by the courts (exhibit 34) have had little to no impacts on achievement. Compared to the rest of the nation, performance in New Jersey has not

increased across most grades and racial groups (exhibits 35-40). These results suggest caution in considering the ability of courts to improve educational outcomes.”135

Hanushek reiterated these claims in the context of a even more recent New York school funding challenge.136 This is a surprising claim to preserve when one’s own recent (2012), marginally more rigorous analyses of state achievement growth rates on national assessments (from 1992 to 2011)137 find the following:

“The other seven states that rank among the top-10 improvers, all of which outpaced the United States as a whole, are Massachusetts, Louisiana, South Carolina, New Jersey, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Virginia.”138

Further, the same report reveals that New Jersey has seen particularly strong growth in reducing the number of the lowest-performing students (those scoring at the “below basic” level), especially for eighth-grade math. To be sure, there are others in academe and policy research that raise questions about the most effective ways to leverage school funding to achieve desired outcomes, and do so via more rigorous, thoughtful analyses. The most recent rigorous and relevant academic research is addressed in the remainder of this brief. There are others who opine in the public square139 and courtroom140 that school finance reform—specifically infusing additional funding to districts serving high-need student populations—is neither the most effective nor the most efficient path toward improving schooling equity or adequacy. But empirical evidence to support claims of more efficient alternatives remains elusive.No rigorous empirical study of which I am aware validates that increased funding for schools in general, or targeted to [end page 17] specific populations, has led to any substantive, measured reduction in student outcomes or other “harm.” Arguably, if this were the case, it would open new doors to school finance litigation against states that choose to increase funding to schools. Twenty years ago, economist Richard Murnane summarized the issue exceptionally well when he stated:

“In my view, it is simply indefensible to use the results of quantitative studies of the relationship between school resources and student achievement as a basis for concluding that additional funds cannot help public school districts. Equally disturbing is the claim that the removal of funds … typically does no harm” (p. 457).141

Murnane’s quote is as relevant today as it was then. The sources of doubt on the “Does money matter?” question are not credible .While there remains much to debate, discuss and empirically evaluate regarding the returns to each additional dollar spent in schools—and the strategies for improving educational efficiency, equity and adequacy—we must finally be willing to cast aside the most inane arguments and sources of evidence on either side of the debate. Specifically, the following five contentions no longer have a legitimate place in the debate over state school finance policy and whether and how money matters in K-12 education:1. Vote counts of correlational studies between spending and outcomes, without regard for rigor of the analyses and quality of the data on which they depend; 2. The long-term trend argument and supporting graphs that show long-term spending going up and NAEP scores staying flat ; 3. International comparisons asserting , and perhaps illustrating via scatterplot,

that the United States spends more than other developed countries but achieves less on international assessments; 4. Anecdotal assertions that states such as New Jersey and cities such as Kansas City provide proof positive that massive infusions of funding have proven ineffective at improving student outcomes; and5. The assertion that how money is spent is much more important than how much is available .

Vote count tallies without regard for study quality and rigor are of relative little use for understanding whether money matters in schooling and are of no use for discerning how. The long-term trend argument is perhaps the most reiterated of all arguments that money doesn’t matter,

but it is built largely on deceptive, oversimplified and largely wrong characterizations (accompanied by distorted visuals) of the long- term trends in student outcomes and school spending. Facile international comparisons are equally deceitful , in that they (a)

fail to account for differences in student populations served and the related scope of educational and related services provided; and (b) fail to appropriately equate educational spending across nations, including the failure to account for the range of services and operating costs covered under “educational expense” in the United States versus other countries (for example, public employee health and pension benefits). And anecdotal assertions of failures resulting from massive infusions of funding are rebutted herein and elsewhere.142Finally, while the assertion that “how money is spent is important” is certainly valid, one cannot reasonably make the leap to assert that how money is spent is necessarily more important than how much money is available. Yes, how money is spent matters, but if you don’t have it, you can’t spend it. It is unhelpful at best for public policy, and harmful to the children subjected to those policies, to pretend without any compelling evidence that somewhere out there exists a far cheaper way to achieve the same or better outcomes (and thus we can cut our way down that more efficient path). As so eloquently noted by a three-judge panel in Kansas when faced with this question:

“Simply, school opportunities do not repeat themselves and when the opportunity for a formal education passes , then for most, it is most likely gone . We all know that the struggle for an income very often—too often— overcomes the time needed to prepare intellectually for a better one.

“If the position advanced here is the State’s full position, it is experimenting with our children which have no recourse from a failure of the experiment.”143

What do we know?Based on the studies reviewed in this brief, there are a few things we can say with confidence about the relationship between funding, resources and student outcomes.First, on average, even in large-scale studies across multiple contexts, aggregate measures of per-pupil spending are positively associated with improved and/or higher student outcomes. In some studies, the size of this effect is larger than in others, and, in some cases, additional funding appears to matter more for some students than for others. Clearly, there are other factors that moderate the influence of funding on student outcomes, such as how that money is spent. But, on balance, in direct tests of the relationship between financial resources and student outcomes, money matters . [end page 18]

Second, schooling resources that cost money, including class size reductions and

increased teacher compensation, are positively associated with student outcomes. Again, these effects are larger in some cases and for some populations. On balance, though, there are ways to spend money that have a solid track record of success. Further, while there may exist alternative uses of financial resources that yield comparable or better returns in student outcomes, no clear evidence identifies what these alternatives might be.Third, sustained improvements to the level and distribution of funding across local public school districts can lead to improvements in the level and distribution of student outcomes . While money alone may not be the answer, adequate and equitable distributions of financial inputs to schooling provide a necessary underlying condition for improving the adequacy and equity of outcomes. That is, if the money isn’t there, schools and districts simply don’t have a “leverage option” that can support strategies that might improve student outcomes. If the money is there, they can use it productively; if it’s not, they can’t. But, even if they have the money, there’s no guarantee that they will use it productively. Evidence from Massachusetts, in particular, suggests that appropriate combinations of more funding with more accountability may be most promising.

5. Prefer our evidence — best empirical analysis. Baker 17 — Bruce D. Baker, Professor in the Department of Educational Theory, Policy, and Administration in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, former Associate Professor of Teaching and Leadership at the University of Kansas, holds an Ed.D. in Organization and Leadership from the Teachers College of Columbia University, 2017 (“Does Money Matter in Education? Second Edition,” Albert Shanker Institute, Available Online at http://www.shankerinstitute.org/sites/shanker/files/moneymatters_edition2.pdf, Accessed 06-14-2017, p. 2)The growing political consensus that money doesn’t matter stands in sharp contrast to the substantial body of empirical research that has accumulated over time , but which gets virtually no attention

in our public discourse.12 This policy brief reviews that literature. Specifically, I review three major bodies of evidence , each of which pertains to a specific element of the broad topic of whether money matters in determining the quality of education. These three literatures are organized by the following guiding questions: [end page 2]

1. Does money matter? Are differences in aggregate school funding associated with differences in short- and long-term measured outcomes?2. Do school resources that cost money matter? Are differences in access to specific schooling programs or resources—where “resources” mean the various things that money buys, such as smaller classes, higher salaries and instructional materials—associated with differences in short- and long-term measured outcomes?3. Do school finance reforms matter? Do substantive and sustained reforms to state school finance systems, including raising the level of funding or redistributing money more

equitably, lead to improvements in the level or distribution of student outcomes?I discuss only domestic studies , primarily those that focus on short-term and intermediate-term outcomes , such as achievement (e.g., test scores) and attainment (e.g., graduation). Furthermore,

preference is given to studies that appear in peer-reviewed academic journals and books (see endnote 13 for the full selection criteria).13 I

also discuss the sources of information that have been frequently used to cast doubt on whether money is related to educational outcomes. Finally, I summarize what we know from the preponderance of evidence, as derived from rigorous empirical analysis, as well as what we do not yet know. And in an appendix to this brief, I discuss, in general terms, methodological issues around the study of whether money matters in education.

6. No tradeoff between “more funding” and “smart spending.” Spielberg 15 — Ben Spielberg, Research Assistant at the Full Employment Project at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, holds a B.S. in Mathematical and Computational Sciences from Stanford University, 2015 (“The Truth About School Funding,” 34justice—a scholarly blog, October 20th, Available Online at https://34justice.com/2015/10/20/the-truth-about-school-funding/, Accessed 07-04-2017)We Should Avoid False Choices and Invest in Kids’ OpportunitiesIncreased funding, to be useful, must of course be spent in smart ways. Money by itself isn’t a panacea. But it’s important to get the facts right: money matters, and it matters quite a bit.

It is incredibly counterproductive to pit increased funding and smart spending against each other (though Mehlhorn’s piece acknowledges “that money spent properly can be helpful in improving achievement,” it balks at the idea that schools need additional funding), especially when schools serving the most disadvantaged students tend to get the fewest resources. Giving schools more money and making sure they spend that money wisely are complementary , not competing, goals .

7. The consensus of the best research disproves Hanushek. Baker 17 — Bruce D. Baker, Professor in the Department of Educational Theory, Policy, and Administration in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, former Associate Professor of Teaching and Leadership at the University of Kansas, holds an Ed.D. in Organization and Leadership from the Teachers College of Columbia University, 2017 (“Does Money Matter in Education? Second Edition,” Albert Shanker Institute, Available Online at http://www.shankerinstitute.org/sites/shanker/files/moneymatters_edition2.pdf, Accessed 06-14-2017, p. 11-12)JJP also address the question of how money is spent, and, in a response to Hanushek, explain that they too concur that how money is spent is important. An important feature of the JJP study is that it does explore the resultant shifts in specific schooling resources in response to shifts in funding . For the most part, increased spending led to increases in typical

schooling resources, including higher educator salaries, smaller classes, and longer school days and years. JJP explain:

“We find that when a district increases per-pupil school spending by $100 due to reforms, spending on instruction increases by about $70, spending on support services increases by roughly $40, spending on capital increases by about $10, while there are reductions in other kinds of school spending, on average.“We find that a 10 percent increase in school spending is associated with about 1.4 more school days, a 4 percent increase in base teacher salaries, and a 5.7 percent reduction in student-teacher ratios. Because classsize reduction has been shown to have larger effects for children from disadvantaged backgrounds, this provides another possible explanation for our overall results.“While there may be other mechanisms through which increased school spending improves student outcomes, these results suggest that the positive effects are driven, at least in part, by some combination of reductions in class size, having more adults per student in schools, increases in instructional time, and increases in teacher salaries that may help to attract and retain a more highly qualified teaching workforce.”

In other words, oft-maligned traditional investments in schooling resources occurred as a result of court-imposed school finance reforms , and those changes in resources were likely responsible for the resultant long-term gains in student outcomes . Such findings are particularly consistent with recent summaries and updated analyses of data on class size reduction .

Several state-specific longitudinal studies of school finance reforms support the JJP findings. Figlio (2004) explains that the influence of state school finance reforms on student outcomes is perhaps better measured within states over time, explaining that national studies of the type attempted by Card and Payne confront problems that include (a) the enormous diversity in the nature of state aid reform plans; and (b) the paucity of national student performance data.80 Accordingly, more recent peer-reviewed studies of state school finance reforms have applied longitudinal analyses within specific states. And several such studies provide compelling evidence of the potential positive effects of school finance reforms.

Studies of Michigan school finance reforms of the 1990s have shown positive effects on student performance in both the previously lowest-spending districts81 and previously lower-performing districts.82 For instance, Roy (2011) found that Michigan’s school finance reforms of the 1990s led to a significant increase among previously low-spending districts . Roy , whose analyses measure both

whether the policy resulted in changes in funding and who was affected, found that Michigan’s school finance plan “was quite successful in reducing interdistrict spending disparities. There was also a significant positive effect on student performance in the lowest-spending districts as measured in state tests” (abstract).83

Similarly, Papke (2001), also evaluating Michigan school finance reforms of the 1990s, found that “ increases in spending have nontrivial, statistically significant effects on math test pass rates, and the effects are largest for schools [end page 11] with initially poor performance” (p. 821).84

Most recently, Hyman (2013) also found positive effects of these Michigan school finance reforms, but the paper raised some concerns regarding the distribution of those effects. Hyman found that much of the increase was targeted to schools serving fewer low-income children. However, the study did find that students exposed to “$1,000, or 12%, more spending per year during grades four through seven experienced a 3.9 percentage point increase in the probability of enrolling in college, and a 2.5 percentage point increase in the probability of earning a degree” (p. 1).85A similar peer-reviewed article by Deke (2003) evaluated “leveling up” of funding for very low-spending districts in Kansas, following a 1992 lower court threat to overturn the funding formula (without formal ruling to that effect). The article found that a 20 percent increase in spending was associated with a 5 percent increase in the likelihood of students going on to postsecondary ed ucation (p. 275).86Elsewhere, three studies of Massachusetts school finance reforms from the 1990s find similar results . The first, a non-peer-reviewed report by Downes, Zabel and Ansel (2009) explored, in combination, the influence

on student outcomes of accountability reforms and changes to school spending. They found that “some of the research findings show how education reform has been successful in raising the achievement of students in the previously low-spending districts” (p. 5).87 The second study, an NBER working paper by Guryan (2001), focused more specifically on the redistribution of

spending resulting from changes to the state school finance formula. Guryan found that “ increases in per-pupil spending led to significant increases in math, reading, science, and social studies test scores for 4th- and 8th-grade students. The magnitudes imply that a $1,000 increase in per-pupil spending leads to about a third to a half of a standard-deviation increase in average test scores. It is noted that the state aid driving the estimates is targeted to under-funded school districts, which may have atypical returns to additional expenditures” (p. 1).88 The most recent of the three, published in

2014 in the Journal of Education Finance, found that “ changes in the state education aid following the education reform resulted in significantly higher student performance ” (p. 297).89

Finally, Downes (2004) conducted earlier studies of Vermont school finance reforms of the late 1990s (Act 60), noting:

“All of the evidence cited in this paper supports the conclusion that Act 60 has dramatically reduced dispersion in education spending and has done this by weakening the link between spending and property wealth. Further, the regressions presented in this paper offer some evidence that student performance has become more equal in the post-Act 60 period. And no results support the conclusion that Act 60 has contributed to increased dispersion in performance” (p. 312).90,91

On balance, it is safe to say that a sizeable and growing body of rigorous empirical literature validates that state school finance reforms can have substantive, positive effects on student outcomes, including reductions in outcome disparities and increases in overall outcome levels . It is also safe to say that the analyses provided by Hanushek and Lindseth (2009) and others92 who have tried to prove

that court-ordered school funding reforms result in few or no measurable improvements offer little credible evidence , due to significant methodological omissions. In other words, not only does money matter , but reforms that determine how money is distributed matter too .

8. Hanushek is totally discredited. Baker 15 — Bruce D. Baker, Professor in the Department of Educational Theory, Policy, and Administration in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, former Associate Professor of Teaching and Leadership at the University of Kansas, holds an Ed.D. in Organization and Leadership from the Teachers College of Columbia University, 2015 (“Education’s Merchant of Doubt: One man’s deceitful mission to undermine fair and adequate school funding,” School Finance 101—a scholarly education blog, August 13th, Available Online at https://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/2015/08/13/educations-merchant-of-doubt-the-plight-of-state-school-finance-systems/, Accessed 07-04-2017)Back in 2012, I opined: “It is hard to imagine a time in the history of American public education when there has been such a widespread political effort to argue that improving the quality of schools has little or nothing to do with the amount of money spent on public education. That is, that money simply doesn’t matter.”[1] It seemed as though at some point, discourse might begin to turn the corner on this question. That it might become more publicly acceptable and even acceptable in some political circles to acknowledge the relevance of money for improving the quality of schooling, and creating more equitable and adequate schools for achieving modern outcome goals.But that rhetoric persists as strong as ever both in political circles and in the pseudo-academic policy research which informs that rhetoric . Further, even as the economy has begun to rebound state school finance systems have continued to lag, perhaps in part due to the persistent rhetoric regarding the irrelevance of school funding, and preferences for not merely revenue neutral, but revenue negative reforms.In reference to a legal challenge brought against New York State, by small city school districts, New York’s Governor Cuomo opined:

“We spend more than any other state in the country,”“It ain’t about the money. It’s about how you spend it – and the results.” [2]

In conversations regarding Federal education spending priorities, Virginia Congressman Dave Brat proclaimed:

“Socrates trained Plato in on a rock and then Plato trained in Aristotle roughly speaking on a rock. So, huge funding is not necessary to achieve the greatest minds and the greatest intellects in history.” [sic][3]

And so it is: we need only provide sufficient collection of rocks to ensure educational adequacy. That is, setting aside the modern-day competitive wage required to recruit and retain philosophy instructors of the quality of Socrates and provide them 1:1 student/teacher ratios.In recently published analysis, I found that during the recession, state school finance systems took a substantial hit, both in terms of total state and local revenue and in terms of equity between districts serving lower and higher poverty student populations:

The recent recession yielded an unprecedented decline in public school funding fairness. Thirty-six states had a three year average reduction in current spending fairness between 2008-09 and 2010-11 and 32 states had a three year average reduction in state and local revenue fairness over that same time period. Over the entire 19-year period, only 15 states saw an overall decline in spending fairness. In years prior to 2008 (starting in 1993) only 11 states saw an overall decline in spending fairness. [4]

A more recent report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities revealed that through 2014-15, most state school finance systems had not yet begun to substantively rebound:

At least 30 states are providing less funding per student for the 2014-15 school year than they did before the recession hit. Fourteen of these states have cut per-student funding by more than 10 percent. (These figures, like all the comparisons in this paper, are in inflation-adjusted dollars and focus on the primary form of state aid to local schools.)Most states are providing more funding per student in the new school year than they did a year ago, but funding has generally not increased enough to make up for cuts in past years. For

example, Alabama is increasing school funding by $16 per pupil this year. But that is far less than is needed to offset the state’s $1,144 per-pupil cut over the previous six years. [5]

In short, the decline of state school finance systems continues and the rhetoric opposing substantive school finance reform shows little sign of easing. Districts serving the neediest student populations continue to take the hardest hit. Yet, concurrently, many states are substantively raising outcome standards for students[6] and increasing the consequences on schools and teachers for not achieving those outcome standards. Some positive signs include recent structural reforms, possibly involving new revenue in California and Pennsylvania, in each case focusing on districts serving high poverty student populations. But other states which cut substantially during the economic downturn, even under the pressure of prior and ongoing judicial review and oversight, have continued to cut (Kansas) or largely freeze state aid (New York).From the cloud of doubt to a rock of certaintyIn my 2012 report Does Money Matter in Education? I explained how one man’s mission to create a cloud of uncertainty surrounding the relationship between school quality and available funding has distorted public policy discourse over school finance reform .

One might characterize Eric Hanushek as education’s own “ merchant of doubt .” I explained the evolution of Eric Hanushek’s frequently reiterated assertions of “no systematic relationship between school expenditures and student performance,” [7] originating in the 1980s, to more recent, bolder claims that substantial funding cuts cause no harm.While compelling evidence has continued to accumulate regarding the importance of funding for improving school quality, Hanushek in various outlets and public testimony has continued to drift from the cloud of doubt to a rock of certainty. That is, certainty that money has little or no role in improving school quality and that school finance reforms which infuse additional funds only lead to greater inefficiency, having little or no effect on either equity or adequacy of schooling.[8]To summarize, the current Hanushekian dogma includes the following core principles:1. Because schools already spend so much and do so with such great inefficiency, additional funding is unlikely (read “will not and cannot”) to lead to improved student outcomes;2. How money is used matters much more than how much money is spent;3. Therefore, some schools and districts having more or less than others is inconsequential, since those with less may simply make smarter spending decisions.

According to the recent rhetoric of Hanushek, these principles are ironclad, in in his own words they are “conventional wisdom,” on which “virtually all analysts” agree. They are “commonly believed,” “overall truth,” and backed by an “enormous amount of scientific analysis” and “substantial econometric evidence,” and “considerable prior research.”For example, in the winter of 2015, in the context of school funding litigation in New York State, Hanushek opined:

“An enormous amount of scientific analysis has focused on how spending and resources of schools relates to student outcomes. It is now commonly believed that spending on schools is not systematically related to student outcomes.”[9]

Yet, the enormous amount of scientific analysis to which Hanushek referred in his expert testimony was primarily cited to a 2003

summary of much of his prior work from the 19 80s , work which has been discredited on numerous occasions , [10] not to mention,

research that has occurred in the last 12 years.[11] Similarly, in the same context (Maisto v. State) Hanushek proclaims:

“There has been substantial econometric evidence that supports this lack of relationship.”Backed again (in footnote 6 of his report) by the same short list of dated self-citation.[12] In an even more recent attempt to rebut a new, major study finding positive effects of school finance reforms,[13] Hanushek (2015) makes the following version of the same claim:

“Considerable prior research has failed to find a consistent relationship between school spending and student performance, making skepticism about such a relationship the conventional wisdom.”[14]

This time, anchoring that claim only to his 2003 piece (by hyperlink to the “prior research” phrase) on the Failure of input based schooling policies,[15] choosing to ignore entirely the considerably larger body of more rigorous work I summarize in my 2012 review on the topic.The extension of these claims that nearly everyone agrees, and all (or, a veritable shit-ton of) research says that there’s no clear relationship between spending and student performance is the assertion that there is broad agreement that how money is spent matters far more than how much there is. As phrased by Hanushek in the context of New York State school finance litigation:

“Virtually all analysts now realize that how money is spent is much more important than how much is spent. This finding is particularly true at the upper levels of current U.S. spending.[16]

As with the prior declarations, this one is made with the exceedingly bold assertion that virtually all analysts agree on this point – without reference to any empirical evidence to that point (a seemingly gaping omission for a decidedly empirical claim about a supposedly empirical truth). Put bluntly, if you don’t have it, you can’t spend it. Thus, the two issues – how much you have and how you spend it – are inextricably linked.Perhaps most disconcerting is that Hanushek has recently extended this argument to declare that equity gaps in funding, or measures of them,

aren’t an important policy concern either. They are, by his proclamation “vacuous” and “lacking any scientific basis.”[17]Put differently, what Hanushek is opining by declaring calculations of equity gaps to be vacuous and lacking scientific basis is that it matters not whether one school or district has more resources than another. Regardless of any spending differences, schools and districts can provide equitable education – toward equitable outcome goals. Those with substantively fewer resources simply need to be more efficient. Since all public schools and districts are presently so inefficient, achieving these efficiency gains through more creative personnel policies, such as performance based pay, and dismissal of “bad teachers”, are easily attainable.Of course, even if we assume creative personnel policies to yield marginal improvements to efficiency, if schools with varied levels of resources pursued these strategies with comparable efficiency gains, inequities would remain constant. Requiring those with less to simply be more efficient with what they have is an inequitable requirement. This argument is often linked in popular media and the blogosphere with the popular book

and film Moneyball, which asserts that clever statistical analysis for selecting high productivity, undervalued players was the basis for the (short lived) success of the low payroll in 2002 and 2003 Oakland A’s baseball team. The flaws of this analogy are too many to explore thoroughly herein, but the biggest flaw is illustrated by the oft-ignored subtitle of the book – The art of winning an unfair game. That is, gaining a leg up through clever player selection is necessary in baseball because vast wealth and payroll differences across teams make baseball an unfair game. Put bluntly, public schooling should not be an unfair game.The Eroding Soil under the RockFrom judges to scholars, critics of evidence (other than myself) used by Hanushek to support the above claims have characterized that evidence as “ facile ,” based on “ fuzzy logic ” [18] and “ weak and factually tenuous .” [19]

Two recurring examples used by Hanushek to illustrate the unimportance of funding increases for improving outcomes, are the “long term trend” or “time trend” argument, and anecdotal claims of the failures of input-based reforms in New Jersey. Baker and Welner (2011) tackle in depth, the fallacies of Hanushek’s New Jersey claims.[20] Here, I point to Hanushek’s own, albeit facile, unacknowledged self-debunking of his New Jersey claims. But first, I address the “long term trend” claim.Again from recent testimony in New York State, Hanushek provides the following exposition of the “long term trend” assertion:

The overall truth of this disconnect of spending and outcomes is easiest to see by looking at the aggregate data for the United States over the past half century. Since 1960, pupil‐teacher ratios fell by one‐third, teachers with master’s degrees over doubled, and median teacher experience grew significantly (Chart 1).4 Since these three factors are the most important determinants of spending per pupil, it leads to the quadrupling of spending between 1960 and 2009 (after adjusting for inflation). At the same time, plotting scores for math and reading performance of 17‐year‐olds on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP, or “The Nation’s Report Card”) shows virtually no change since 1970 (Charts 2 and 3).5[21]

This claim like many others is made with language of astounding certainty – the “overall truth” as it exists in the mind of Hanushek. This claim is commonly accompanied by graphs showing per pupil spending going up over time, pupil to teacher ratios going down, and national assessment scores appearing relatively flat, much of which is achieved via the smoke and mirrors of representing spending and outcome data on completely different scales, and failures to adjust appropriately for changing costs and related obligations of the public education system, and changing demography of the tested population.[22] Oversimplified visuals are used to make the proclamation that student achievement shows “virtually no change,” a statement discredited on closer inspection .[23] Jackson and colleagues provide additional examples of how such facile analyses lead to fallacious conclusions (ironically using cigarette smoking data).[24]Hanushek extends his use of the long term trend argument in his recent critique of findings from Jackson and colleagues that court ordered infusions of funding to select schools and districts led to long term gains in educational attainment, income and poverty reduction for those subjected to increased funding. Hanushek asserts:

If a ten percent increase yields the results calculated by Jackson, Johnson, and Persico, shouldn’t we have found all gaps gone (and even reversed) by now due to the actual funding increases?

Thus, if the massive average spending increases reported by Hanushek as the actual long term trend did not lead to elimination or reversal of gaps, Jackson, Johnson and Persico’s findings must be wrong? Right?Of course, this assertion is complete and utter nonsense, because Jackson and colleagues don’t assert, and Hanushek’s own national average long term trend data do not show that all low income children, lower performing subgroups and/or those in low wealth communities were subjected to dramatic funding increases. In fact, if Hanushek’s average spending increases were driven as much by increases in wealthy (low poverty/minority) districts as they were by increases in poorer districts, then gaps would likely remain constant, all else equal. That is, the average level of funding, and changes in average level say nothing of gaps or distributions in funding or changes in gaps or distributions. Put bluntly, the average level of funding, and the distribution of funding are two different things. Conflating the two is intentionally deceitful.As explained by Baker and Welner (2011)[25] Hanushek for years has cited the failures of New Jersey ’s school finance reforms as the basis for why other states should not increase funding to high poverty schools. In litigation in Kansas in 2011, Hanushek proclaimed:

“The dramatic spending increases called for by the courts (exhibit 34) have had little to no impacts on achievement. Compared to the rest of the nation, performance in New Jersey has not

increased across most grades and racial groups (exhibits 35-40). These results suggest caution in considering the ability of courts to improve educational outcomes.”[26]

Hanushek reiterated these claims in the context of the even more recent New York school funding challenge. [27] This is a surprising claim to preserve when one’s own recent (2012) marginally more rigorous analyses of state achievement growth rates on national assessments (from 1992 to 2011)

[28] find the following: “The other seven states that rank among the top-10 improvers , all of which outpaced the U nited States as a whole, are Massachusetts, Louisiana, South Carolina, New Jersey, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Virginia.”[29]

The same report by Hanushek shows impressive reductions in the share of students scoring “below basic” in New Jersey, especially for 8th grade math (Figure 4).To be sure, there are others in academe and policy research that raise questions about the most effective ways to leverage school funding to achieve desired outcomes, and do so via more rigorous, thoughtful analyses.There are others who opine in the public square[30] and courtroom[31] that school finance reform – specifically infusing additional funding to districts serving high need student populations – is neither the most effective nor most efficient path toward improving schooling equity or adequacy. But empirical evidence to support claims of more efficient alternatives remains elusive.Nonetheless, the “facile” and “factually tenuous” illustrations above

must be put to rest , and the divisive, manipulative (intellectually insulting) and damaging rhetoric of education’s merchant of doubt cast aside once and for all.

9. Hanushek’s methodology is wrong. Baker 17 — Bruce D. Baker, Professor in the Department of Educational Theory, Policy, and Administration in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, former Associate Professor of Teaching and Leadership at the University of Kansas, holds an Ed.D. in Organization and Leadership from the Teachers College of Columbia University, 2017 (“Does Money Matter in Education? Second Edition,” Albert Shanker Institute, Available Online at http://www.shankerinstitute.org/sites/shanker/files/moneymatters_edition2.pdf, Accessed 06-14-2017, p. 9-10)Do School Finance Reforms Matter?A particularly relevant question for informing the current “Does money matter?” debate is whether increased and sustained funding provided through state school finance reforms can improve the level or distribution of student outcomes, including both long-term outcomes and short-term shifts in academic achievement. In other words, does the manner in which states distribute money matter? And how can we tell? Findings regarding these specific questions might, most directly, inform state legislative debates over tax policy and education spending.Most funding for public education comes from state and local sources and is under the jurisdiction of state school finance systems. Therefore, states have the greatest control over whether local public schools have access to sufficient levels of resources, and whether those resources are distributed equitably across children and settings. Furthermore, constitutional protections for children’s access to adequate and equitable public schooling exist in state constitutions, not in the U.S. Constitution. Finally, as indicated at the outset of this brief, it is at the state level where the most raucous rhetoric is occurring around these questions of whether money matters in education. State legislatures and governors can make or break public schooling, and they have.69Kevin Welner of the University of Colorado and I published an extensive review on this specific topic, which appears in the November 2011 issue of Teachers College Record. Among other things, we address the research complexities of answering questions about the efficacy of state school finance reforms. Those complexities can often be reduced to asking the right questions about (a) whether substantive reforms were actually implemented; (b) when they were implemented and how long they were sustained; and (c) who was most affected by the reforms.

As with other bodies of literature on the effectiveness of schooling resources, the research on state school finance reforms is a mixed bag in terms of analytic rigor . Secondhand references to dreadful failures following massive infusions of new funding can often be traced to methodologically inept, anecdotal tales of desegregation litigation in Kansas City, Mo., or to the court-ordered financing of urban districts in New Jersey.70In 2009, Eric Hanushek and a consulting defense attorney for states facing school funding challenges, Alfred Lindseth of Sutherland Asbill & Brennan,

produced a book in which one chapter is dedicated to trying to prove that court-ordered school funding reforms in New Jersey, Wyoming,

Kentucky and Massachusetts resulted in few or no measurable improvements.71 These conclusions , however, are based on little more than a series of graphs of student achievement on the National Assessment of Educational Progress in 1992 and 2007 . The authors show little change in these states’ scores and conclude that the reforms didn’t work. The authors assume that, during this period, each of the four states infused substantial additional funds into public education in response to judicial orders, and that these funds were targeted at low-income and minority students.72’73 They also necessarily assume that in all other states that serve as a comparison group, similar changes did not occur . Yet they validate neither assertion .

In contrast, Welner and I review several studies applying more rigorous and appropriate methods for evaluating the influence of state school finance reforms. Among these [end page 9] analyses is one national study by Card and Payne (2002) that evaluates whether changes in spending inequality generally lead to changes in outcome inequality.74 The authors measure both the extent and the timing

of changes in each. These analyses , while imperfect, rise to a level far above those conducted by Hanushek and Lindseth. Card and Payne found “evidence that equalization of spending levels leads to a narrowing of test score outcomes across family background groups” (p. 49).75

10. Prefer our evidence — Mehlhorn is wrong. Spielberg 15 — Ben Spielberg, Research Assistant at the Full Employment Project at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, holds a B.S. in Mathematical and Computational Sciences from Stanford University, 2015 (“The Truth About School Funding,” 34justice—a scholarly blog, October 20th, Available Online at https://34justice.com/2015/10/20/the-truth-about-school-funding/, Accessed 07-04-2017)Dmitri Mehlhorn, co-founder of StudentsFirst, wrote an article a few weeks ago about school funding titled, “How Money is Spent Matters.” That statement is obviously true; who could disagree with it?Unfortunately, the article’s actual argument – that “America’s schools are not underfunded” – is completely false. This post corrects the record. Funding for public primary

and secondary education in the United States is, in fact, inadequate and inequitable, and rectifying this problem should be a top priority for anyone who cares about improving our schools.We’re Far From School Funding EquityBut what is adequate and equitable school funding? Researchers Bruce Baker and Danielle Farie and civil rights lawyer David Sciarra, who produce a National Report Card on school funding fairness, discuss this question at length in their 2015 report. One of the most important principles they note is that, because “[v]arying levels of funding are required to provide equal educational opportunities to children with different needs[,] finance systems should provide more funding to districts serving larger shares of students in poverty.”School funding in the United States doesn’t come close to meeting this criterion; as Baker, Farie, and Sciarra show, fourteen states have regressive school funding systems, meaning they allocate less money to schools serving disadvantaged students than they do to schools serving more affluent student populations. Nineteen other states have roughly equivalent funding between the two types of schools. Only four states – Minnesota, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Delaware – score high enough across all of the researchers’ criteria (funding level; funding distribution; effort, or funding as a share of the state’s economy; and coverage, or “the share of school-age children enrolled in public schools and the degree to which there is economic disparity between households in the public versus private education system”) to have their funding systems deemed “fair.”This analysis likely represents an upper bound on the degree of school funding equity in the United States. While California appears to have roughly equivalent funding for low- and high-income schools in the report, for example, there are major funding discrepancies between some of the state’s “basic aid” districts, which serve affluent students, and districts that serve lower-income populations. Within-district variations in spending also go undetected in the report’s metrics, as may situations in which funding that is supposed to follow high-need students doesn’t reach them.Inequitable school funding is a widely acknowledged problem, so much so that people associated with StudentsFirst – the very

organization Mehlhorn co-founded – recognize that addressing it is imperative. Yet Mehlhorn ’s article doesn’t mention the distribution of school funding at all, except when making misleading statements about charter school spending.Charter School Research Supports Calls for More School FundingAs Baker, Ken Libby, and Kathryn Wiley found in a careful 2012 analysis of charter school and traditional public school spending:

Comparative spending between the two sectors is mixed, with many high profile charter network schools outspending similar district schools in New York City and Texas, but other charter network schools spending less than similar district schools, particularly in Ohio.

Mehlhorn’s counterclaim that charter schools spend significantly less money than traditional public schools likely stems from a 2011 report from the National Center for Education Statistics, but it, like more cursory and flawed studies, may fail to appropriately categorize spending that should be assigned to each type of school. Transportation funding and spending on food services and special education, for example, can be misclassified in such analyses.In addition, students in traditional public schools perform just about as well on average as students in charters; as Harvard professor Tom Loveless has explained, the differences in student test score results between the two sectors “are extremely small, so tiny, in fact, that they lack real world significance.” Mehlhorn’s inaccurate claims to the contrary rely on a completely invalid “months of learning” conversion performed in a recent study of urban charter schools; the study actually shows a tiny difference between the charter and traditional public school sectors (less than .06 standard deviations, or a good deal less than one additional question answered correctly on most tests).In other words, there’s only one real conclusion that can be drawn about the research on overall levels of charter school funding and average student test scores: arguments touting charter schools as a low-cost solution to boost student achievement are either uninformed or deliberately misleading (especially because the student populations charters serve are typically unrepresentative subsets of the surrounding traditional public school populations, and because many studies don’t distinguish school effects from peer effects).There is, of course, important variation in the charter sector; some studies indicate that students in some charter school networks do very well. As Baker, Libby, and Wiley note, however, many of these networks spend substantially more per pupil (sometimes well over 30 percent more) than comparable public schools. Similarly, the test score gains in New Orleans charters that Mehlhorn applauds came with a

substantial price tag, a fact that his article conveniently omits. The following excerpt from an interview with researcher Doug Harris is instructive on this point:

At the beginning New Orleans was spending about $8,000 more per pupil relative to similar districts. In other words, spending didn’t quite double, but it came pretty close to doubling in the initial years. And then it converged back to the normal, or close to normal rate. Now they’re spending about $1,000 more per pupil than similar districts, whereas before the storm they were spending close to the same as those comparison districts.

Harris doesn’t believe the test score gains in New Orleans were entirely a product of increased funding – he finds that explanation unlikely and thinks “every element of the reform package, including the change in spending, probably contributed in some fashion” – but acknowledges that it’s possible that increased funding played the primary role. In addition, while Harris thinks there are important lessons to be learned from school reform there, he doubts “you’d see the same effects in other places because the conditions [in New Orleans] were distinctive.”Either way, to the extent that best practices in certain successful charter schools drive their results, these practices can likely be replicated in traditional public schools that receive more adequate funding, as research by Roland Fryer suggests. Especially because rapid charter school expansion has often led to harmful side-effects (in New Orleans, the large-scale firing of Black teachers and inattention to community preferences are poignant examples), our efforts are best focused not on promoting charters, but on adequately and equitably funding all schools, thus enabling them to implement best practices that may include but are not limited to better teacher training and support, more competitive teacher pay (to facilitate recruitment and retention), reduced class sizes, extended learning time, expanded tutoring availability, and enhanced extracurricular opportunities.School Funding Research Confirms How Much Money MattersThere’s also a very strong research basis to support increased school funding – a research basis at least as strong as, if not stronger than , that behind practically any other education policy proposal. Mehlhorn ’s article elevates shaky empirical work from 25 years ago by Eric Hanushek (and work from nearly 50 years ago by James Coleman) to argue that money isn’t particularly important while downplaying the much larger body of more recent and careful research that comes to the opposite conclusion.

In 2012, Baker reviewed dozens of newer, higher-quality studies pertaining to this topic (Mehlhorn’s article mentions Baker’s review, but doesn’t link to it and paints an inaccurate picture of its findings). As Baker’s review shows:

[T]here are a few things we can say with confidence about the relationship between funding, resources, and student outcomes:First, on average, even in large-scale studies across multiple contexts, aggregate measures of per-pupil spending are positively associated with improved and/or higher student outcomes…

Second, schooling resources that cost money, including class size

reductions and increased teacher compensation, are positively associated with student outcomes…Further, while there may exist alternative uses of financial resources that yield comparable or better returns in student outcomes, no clear evidence identifies what these alternatives might be…Third, sustained improvements to the level and distribution of funding across local public school districts can lead to improvements in the level and distribution of student outcomes. While money alone may not be the answer, adequate and equitable distributions of financial inputs to schooling provide a necessary underlying condition for improving adequacy and equity of outcomes.

A new high-quality study by C. Kirabo Jackson, Rucker Johnson, and Claudia Persico

comes to the same conclusion. Mehlhorn’s article also mentions this study, but

misinterprets the results; it mistakenly compares the invalid “months of learning” statistic from the charter school research discussed above (which actually represents data on student test scores) with Jackson et al.’s data on completed years of schooling.In reality, Jackson et al.’s results are much more striking than most results in education research; the researchers argue in EducationNext that, “for low-income children, a 10 percent increase in per-pupil spending each year for all 12 years of public school is associated with roughly 0.5 additional years of completed education, 9.6 percent higher wages, and a 6.1-percentage-point reduction in the annual incidence of adult poverty.” While they concede in a follow-up piece that increased school funding won’t “eliminate all differences in outcomes by socioeconomic status,” they contend “that a 22.7 percent spending increase is large enough to eliminate the average outcome differences between the poor (those with family incomes below twice the poverty line) and the non-poor (those with family incomes above twice the poverty line).”The researchers’ claims here are overstated – they’re extrapolations beyond the actual results that, while less misleading than the “months of learning” statistic, are still misguided attempts to help a broader audience understand research findings – but it’s important to note that the magnitudes are very large relative to the results in most education studies.

It’s also worth noting that even Hanushek , who is one of the only researchers who continues to question the importance of school finance reforms, has never said that money never matters

(Mehlhorn’s article gets that point right) and has admitted that schools serving more disadvantaged students should receive more funding .We Can Afford to Spend More on Public SchoolsSome skeptics of increased funding, Mehlhorn included, attempt to compare education spending in America with education spending in other countries. Mehlhorn writes:

The best, though, imperfect way, to understand how well America is spending money on education is look at how much other nations – most-notably highly-touted Finland and South Korea — spend on their schools.

His article then proceeds to pull numbers from an OECD report to argue that Americans spend more on education than people in other countries, which, according to Mehlhorn, makes it “clear that money isn’t the main problem in American public education.”The problem, however, is that the numbers in Mehlhorn ’s piece are cherry- picked; they don’t actually speak to his argument about public K-12 education spending. As the OECD report notes, the figures Mehlhorn cites include public and private spending on primary, secondary, and tertiary education – that is, college – including but not limited to spending on transportation, meals, school health services, college dormitories, and “private spending on books and other school materials or private tutoring.”In general, the OECD data shouldn’t be used for cross-country comparisons; it doesn’t count spending the same way in each country and likely makes US spending appear larger relative to spending in other countries than it actually is. To the extent that the data can be illustrative, however, the appropriate approach would exclude college costs and private spending and focus on K-12 public school spending as a share of the economy (as opposed to using raw numbers; spending as a share of GDP provides a better indication of how much a country spends relative to what it can afford). Doing so (see Table B4.1 here) indicates that public spending on primary and secondary education in the United States, relative to GDP, is lower than spending as a share of the economy in Finland, the same as such spending in Korea, and slightly below the OECD average . Again, the data is flawed, but it likely provides a high-end estimate of United States education spending relative to such spending elsewhere.Mehlhorn’s article also paints an incomplete picture of historical levels of education funding in the U nited States. The fact that K-12 spending has risen in inflation-adjusted dollar value terms over

the past 45 years doesn’t tell us anything about whether school spending levels are sufficient , and real spending on practically everything has increased in dollar terms since the 1970s; in fact, real spending should

increase as our economy grows. A more appropriate (though still imperfect; one flaw is that

it’s not adjusted for changing demographics) look at K-12 public education spending in the United States reveals that we are spending approximately the same amount relative to the size of our economy that we were several decades ago.

What’s more, K-12 education funding has declined significantly even in real dollar terms in recent years ; during the 2014-2015 school year, 35 states were still providing less total state and local per pupil funding than they had been providing before the Great Recession. Title I funding for low-income schools and special education funding have also fallen since 2010.

Finally, it’s important to remember that even if aggregate funding levels were higher, aggregate numbers don’t speak to the distribution of funding. We’ve yet to target and sustain increased funding in schools that serve our neediest students . Especially when it comes to low-income areas, America definitely can – and should – invest more in K-12 public education .

11. Mehlhorn is wrong — prefer JJP. Spielberg 15 — Ben Spielberg, Research Assistant at the Full Employment Project at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, holds a B.S. in Mathematical and Computational Sciences from Stanford University, 2015 (“The Truth About School Funding,” 34justice—a scholarly blog, October 20th, Available Online at https://34justice.com/2015/10/20/the-truth-about-school-funding/, Accessed 07-04-2017)2) David Dayen recently wrote an excellent piece about why citations of raw numbers for government spending – of the type that appear in Mehlhorn’s piece –

are misleading. I highly recommend it. Mehlhorn is also mistaken about historical trends in real (inflation-adjusted) spending outside of education; as a quick look at the data for some of the categories he mentions (like certain

technologies or defense) confirms, spending on (which is different than prices of things in)

these categories has also grown over time (though by different amounts than education spending and not on a per capita basis for defense, which it would have been fine to point out).One fair point Mehlhorn does make is that inflation-adjusted spending levels have value. I used spending as a share of GDP above to note that the US spends less on education relative to what we can afford than many other countries and that our education spending relative to what we can afford hasn’t changed much over time. Those facts in and of themselves don’t necessarily mean that our spending levels are insufficient; they just show that our investment in education is consistent with historical and international norms. But while it’s fine for Mehlhorn to note that per-pupil spending in the US is up significantly in real terms since the 1970s, that also doesn’t necessarily tell us anything about whether spending levels are sufficient. We may have been spending way too little in the 19 70s, and we still may be spending way too little now.

In any case, Mehlhorn’s note that education spending has increased more than test scores doesn’t say anything , by itself, about the efficacy of that spending . Student test scores are influenced more by outside-of-school factors than by school-based factors and it’s impossible to know how effective an intervention was without knowing what would have happened in the absence of the intervention. Maybe test scores would have fallen if spending had remained flat. We don’t know. What we do know is that studies that attempt to identify a counterfactual, like Jackson et al.’s, indicate that increased school funding makes an important difference .

12. Prefer our evidence — Greene isn’t credible. Martin 5 — Doug Martin, Education Blogger at Schools Matter, holds a Ph.D. in Literary Prosody, Research, and 19th Century American Literature from Oklahoma State University, 2005 (“Who is Jay P. Greene, and Why is He Going to Arkansas?,” Schools Matter—an education blog, July 28th, Available Online at http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2005/07/who-is-jay-p-greene-and-why-is-he.html, Accessed 06-25-2017)Today's Arkansas Times has a great piece of reporting by Doug Smith. Smith reports that Jay P. Greene, lead education propagandist for the Manhattan Institute , the conservative think tank, has been pegged to head University of Arkansas at Fayetteville's new Department of Ed ucation Reform. It seems that Greene's previous self-published "research" to pump school privatization through vouchers will now have an actual university to sponsor the junk studies and "working papers" that have been widely cited in the Washington Times, the New York Sun,

the National Review Online, and other non-academic, non-peer reviewed outlets—all of them fair and balanced, of course.This is all interesting enough, but what make it really interesting is, as Smith points

out, the money for financing (20,000,000 dollars) the new department (and its endowed chair) comes from Arkansas's other favorite son, Sam Walton and the Walton Family Foundation. Now we are talking serious money, enough to lure Greene from his Manhattan Institute digs (located somewhere outside Orlando, Florida, by the way).

13. Increased funding makes a huge difference — prefer JJP. Darling-Hammond 15 — Linda Darling-Hammond, Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education and Faculty Director of the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education at Stanford University, former President of the American Educational Research Association, former Senior Social Scientist and Director of the RAND Education and Human Resources Program at the RAND Corporation, holds an Ed.D. in Urban Education from Temple University, 2015 (“Society Benefits When We Spend More on Education,” Room for Debate—a New York Times scholarly blog, March 26th, Available Online at https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/03/26/is-improving-schools-all-about-money/society-benefits-when-we-spend-more-on-education, Accessed 06-07-2017)The promise of equal opportunity, most especially in education, is at the heart of the American dream: If you study and work hard, the promise goes, you can achieve your aspirations.

Yet our schools are among the most unequally funded in the industrialized world, with some states spending more than

double what others spend per pupil, and some districts within each state spending double or triple what others can allocate.

Worse still, many states spend less in school districts that serve low-income students and new immigrants who need more support to succeed. While some students attend spacious, well-outfitted schools with extensive libraries, science labs, computers and small classes, others attend crumbling, overcrowded buildings where they lack access to basic textbooks and trained teachers.

More than 40 states have experienced school funding lawsuits about these unjust conditions, and in each case, defense attorneys bring in experts who argue that money doesn’t make a difference. Yet money that is properly spent on the right educational resources for students who need them the most — especially on well-qualified educators and keeping classes at reasonable sizes — can make a huge difference .

A recent study of school funding reforms over the last 40 years or

so shows just how much of a difference money can make: For low- income students who spent all 12 years of school in districts that increased their spending by 20 percent as a result of court- ordered reforms, graduation rates rose by 23 percentage points and adult poverty rates fell by 20 percentage points . The students’ family incomes were about 52 percent higher than they would have been without the greater education investment. The effects were large enough in many cases to entirely eliminate the gap in adult outcomes between those raised in poor families and those raised in non-poor families.When young people are gainfully employed rather than in prison or on welfare, when they are earning higher wages and paying greater taxes that support the retirement, health care and social needs of other citizens, everyone wins. Money , invested well in education , makes an enormous difference to the welfare of everyone in our society .

14. Prefer JJP — it’s high-quality. Yinger 14 — John Yinger, Trustee Professor of Public Administration and Economics, Director of the Education Finance and Accountability Program, Director of the Center for Policy Research, and Associate Director of the Metropolitan Studies Program at The Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University, former Assistant Professor of Economics at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Princeton University, 2014 (“School Spending Matters!,” It’s Elementary—a monthly column published by Syracuse University’s Education Finance and Accountability Program, August, Available Online at http://cpr.maxwell.syr.edu/efap/about_efap/ie/August14.pdf, Accessed 07-06-2017, p. 1)An important study by J ackson, Johnson, and Persico provides powerful new evidence that school spending matters .1 This study is directly relevant to debates about education policy in New York State.Using national data for the U.S. over a long period of time (1967-

2010), these scholars show that school finance reforms “have been

instrumental in equalizing school spending between low- and high-income districts.” Moreover, they find

that for children from poor families, increasing per-pupil spending by 20 percent for a child’s entire K-12 schooling career increases high school completion by 22.9 percentage points, increases the overall number of years of education by 0.928, increases adult earnings by about 24.6 percent, increases annual family income by 52.2 percent, and reduces the incidence of adult poverty by 19.7 percentage points.

They also find “no discernable effects of increased school spending on children from non-poor families.”This is a high-quality study . The data set is appropriate and impressive and the methodology is sound. The authors conduct numerous checks and find that the results hold up very well .

The estimated effects are not only statistically significant but also

large. As the authors put it, a 20 percent increase in spending on poor children for their entire K-12 career would “eliminate between two-thirds and all of the gaps in these adult outcomes between those raised in poor families and those raised in non-poor families.”

15. Prefer JJP’s methodology. Sawhill 15 — Isabel V. Sawhill, Senior Fellow and former Director of Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution, former Senior Fellow at The Urban Institute, former Associate Director of the Office of Management and Budget during the Clinton Administration, holds a Ph.D. from New York University, 2015 (“Does money matter?,” Real Clear Markets, September 8th, Available Online at https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/does-money-matter/, Accessed 07-06-2017)The age-old debate about whether money matters for educational outcomes is sure to be debated in the 2016 Campaign. Gov. Scott Walker has cut aid to local schools evidently believing that school budgets are bloated. In the meantime, many Democrats are said to be too close to the teachers’ unions and too interested in throwing money at the problem. What should we believe? The latest research suggests that money does matter . Of course, it

matters how and where it is spent and it needs to be combined with accountability for results. But the whole notion that we can reduce spending on education and do no harm or that new resources don’t have the potential to improve both the level and the distribution of student outcomes is just plain wrong .

Skepticism about the impact of education spending on outcomes was initially fueled by the Coleman report in 1966 and was heightened by a

much-cited review by Eric Hanushek in 1986 suggesting that in a large number of studies there was no consistent evidence of a relationship between expenditures per pupil and student performance.In a rebuttal of this thesis and a more up-to-date review, Rutgers

professor Bruce Baker notes that Hanushek never said that money didn’t matter; he simply showed that the evidence didn’t all point in one consistent direction. Moreover, subsequent studies with better data and more robust methodologies have tended to

show that money does indeed matter. Some studies , for example,

focus on state-initiated reforms in aid formulas and look at the effects of changes in spending on student achievement. This approach avoids the problem of assuming that any correlation between existing levels of funding and school success are causal when, in reality, they more likely reflect other confounding factors .

For example, if federal or state aid to education is targeted on schools in high-poverty areas, this will tend to suggest that resource levels don’t matter or may even reduce student performance when it is really the poor performance that leads to the extra funding.

The most recent study that attempts to deal with this methodological problem is by C. Kirabo Jackson of Northwestern University, Rucker C.

Johnson of Berkeley, and their colleague Claudia Persico. They find that increased school spending improves student outcomes, especially for low-income students. For example, increasing per-pupil spending by 10 percent in the K-12 years increases the probability of high school graduation by roughly 10 percentage points for low-income children and by 2.5 percentage points for higher-income children. The positive effects appear to be the result of a reduction in class size, a higher ratio of adults to students, increases in instructional time, and increases in teacher salaries that help to attract and retain higher quality teachers.Teacher salaries are, in my view, a huge issue. Schools are now competing for talent with other sectors in a way that wasn’t true in a world where well-educated women had few professional opportunities. Until more people accept the need to raise teacher salaries significantly, schools are not likely to improve. To be sure, salaries need to be linked to performance and better measures of teacher performance should be developed. But the main reason that money matters in education is because teachers matter, and attracting and retaining the best talent has to be a priority.

16. Prefer Baker, not Hanushek. Spielberg 15 — Ben Spielberg, Research Assistant at the Full Employment Project at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, holds a B.S. in Mathematical and Computational Sciences from Stanford University, 2015 (“The Truth About School Funding,” 34justice—a scholarly blog, October 20th, Available Online at https://34justice.com/2015/10/20/the-truth-about-school-funding/, Accessed 07-04-2017)1) Mehlhorn devotes a lot of space to attacking Bruce Baker for editorializing. Baker certainly does have strong opinions, but I actually

think it’s nice that he’s transparent about his perspective – all researchers have biases, and it’s in many ways preferable to know about them upfront. Baker’s work is strong and consistent with other recent research . The research Mehlhorn relies on – from Eric Hanushek, a member of the Right-wing Hoover Institution (note that Mehlhorn does not once mention Hanushek’s affiliation and biases) – is typically much older and a clear outlier (as I explained above).

17. Hanushek’s critique of JJP is wrong. Baker 17 — Bruce D. Baker, Professor in the Department of Educational Theory, Policy, and Administration in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, former Associate Professor of Teaching and Leadership at the University of Kansas, holds an Ed.D. in Organization and Leadership from the Teachers College of Columbia University, 2017 (“Does Money Matter in Education? Second Edition,” Albert Shanker Institute, Available Online at http://www.shankerinstitute.org/sites/shanker/files/moneymatters_edition2.pdf, Accessed 06-14-2017, p. 10-11)Additional compelling studies have been published since my review in 2011. In 2014 and 2015, Kirabo Jackson, Rucker Johnson and Claudia Persico

(JJP) released a series of NBER working papers and articles summarizing their analyses of a uniquely constructed national data set in which they evaluate the long-term effects of selective, substantial infusions of funding to local public school districts,

which occurred primarily in the 1970s and 1980s, on high school graduation rates and eventual adult income. Virtues of the JJP analysis include that the analysis provides clearer linkages than many prior studies between the mere presence of “school finance reform,” the extent to which school finance reform substantively changed the distribution of spending and other resources across schools and children, and the outcome effects of those changes. The authors also go beyond the usual short-run connections between changes

in the level and distribution of funding, and changes in the level and distribution of test scores, to evaluate changes in the level and distribution of educational attainment, high school completion, adult wages, adult family income and the incidence of adult poverty.To do so, the authors use data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics on “roughly 15,000 PSID sample members born between 1955 and 1985, who have been followed into adulthood through 2011.” The authors’ analysis rests on the assumption that these individuals, and specific individuals among them, were differentially affected by the infusions of resources resulting from school finance reforms that occurred during their years in K-12 schooling. One methodological shortcoming of this long-term analysis is the imperfect connection between the treatment and the population that received that treatment.76 The authors matched childhood address data to school district boundaries to identify whether a child attended a district likely subject to additional funding as a result of court-mandated school finance reform. While imperfect, this approach creates a tighter link between the treatment and the treated than exists in many prior national, longitudinal and even state-specific school finance analyses.77Regarding the effects of school finance reforms on long-term outcomes, the authors summarize their findings as follows:

“Thus, the estimated effect of a 22 percent increase in per-pupil spending throughout all 12 school-age years for low-income children is large enough to eliminate the education gap between children from low-income and nonpoor families. In relation to current spending levels (the average for 2012 was $12,600 per pupil), this would correspond to increasing per-pupil spending permanently by roughly $2,863 per student.“Specifically, increasing per-pupil spending by 10 percent in all 12 school-age years increases the probability of high school graduation by 7 percentage points for all students, by roughly 10 percentage points for low-income children, and by 2.5 percentage points for nonpoor children.“For children from low-income families, increasing perpupil spending by 10 percent in all 12 school-age years boosts adult hourly wages by $2.07 in 2000 dollars, or 13 percent.”78

The findings of this study have been met with some criticism.

Specifically, Eric Hanushek has asserted that these findings of strong, positive longitudinal effects of school finance reforms on student outcomes, running between 1972 and 2011, are entirely

inconsistent with his characterization of long-term trends in school spending and national average test scores. According to Hanushek, if the effects JJP describe are real, then the massive infusions of funding to public education over time would have mitigated achievement gaps and substantially driven up national averages. Hanushek explains:

“Their analysis covers schooling experiences for the period 1970-2010. Thus, it is useful to connect these estimates to actual funding patterns over the period. Between 1970 and 1990, real expenditure per pupil increased not by 10 percent but by over 84 percent. By 2000, this comparison with 1970 topped 100 percent, and it reached almost 150 percent by 2010. No amount of adjustment for special education, LEP, or what have you will make these extraordinary increases in school funding go away.“If a ten percent increase yields the results calculated by Jackson, Johnson, and Persico, shouldn’t we have found all gaps gone (and even reversed) by now due to the actual funding increases? And, even with small effects on the non-poor, shouldn’t we have seen fairly dramatic improvements in overall educational and labor market outcomes? In reality, in the face of dramatic past increases in school funding, the gaps in attainment, high school graduation, and family poverty have remained significant, largely resisting any major improvement. And, the stagnating labor market performance for broad swaths of the population has captured considerable recent public and scholarly attention.”

Perhaps the most illogical assertion of Hanushek is that applying the effect of funding increases estimated by JJP to the actual long-term growth in national average per-pupil [end page 10]

spending would lead to the elimination or reversal of achievement gaps. As such, since gaps have not been eliminated or reversed, JJP’s estimates must be wrong. Neither JJP’s nor Hanushek’s national average spending data indicate that all spending increases from 1970 to 2010 were targeted to all high- poverty districts nationwide. If Hanushek’s average spending increases were driven as much by increases in wealthy (low

poverty/minority) districts as they were by increases in poorer districts, then gaps would likely remain constant, all else being equal.79

The identification of substantial gains in lifelong outcomes for children in districts that did experience increased funding indicates that greater gains perhaps could have been achieved for children in lower-wealth, higher-poverty communities, if funding increases had been more systematically targeted to those communities, nationwide, throughout the time period.

Thus, the critical reviewer must ask whether the data, methods and analytic approach applied by JJP are sufficiently more rigorous , and thus provide more compelling evidence, than the long-term trend exposition of Hanushek. The simple answer to that is yes .

A secondary critique offered by Hanushek is that the funding increases evaluated by JJP occurred largely in the 1970s and early 1980s, when overall spending was much lower, thus making marginal gains potentially more important than now, when spending has reached and stabilized at inefficiently high levels

across the board. Notably, however, JJP’s analyses span a longer period than merely the early 1970s and also span multiple contexts of higher and lower spending over the period. While subsequent replications of

JJP’s findings and further exploration of their data will provide additional insights, the current studies provide compelling evidence that school finance reforms can be leveraged to equalize educational and long-term economic opportunity.

18. Hanushek’s critique of JJP doesn’t disprove their results. JJP 15 — C. Kirabo Jackson, Associate Professor of Human Development and Social Policy at Northwestern University, Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research, Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University, et al., with Rucker C. Johnson, Associate Professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California-Berkeley, Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, Faculty Research Fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University, Research Affiliate at the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan, Research Affiliate at the Institute for Poverty Research at the University of Wisconsin, holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Michigan, and Claudia Persico, Assistant Professor of the Economics of Education in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis and Faculty Affiliate of the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Research Affiliate at Northwestern University, holds a Ph.D. in Human Development and Social Policy from the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University, 2015 (“Money Does Matter After All,” Education Next, July 17th, Available Online at http://educationnext.org/money-matter/, Accessed 07-04-2017)We would like to thank Eric Hanushek for his comments and interest in our work. We appreciate the opportunity to offer a brief response. Hanushek provides an accurate description of our study and is correct that the methodological details matter. His critique, however, is not an objection to any of our method ological choices; he instead disputes our results. He states “while these [questions about measurement and how spending reactions to court decision is measured…] are important methodological issues, it is more useful to focus on the substance of their findings.” We take this as clear evidence that Hanushek finds our method ology sound . When the methods are sound, the results must be taken seriously. We appreciate that Hanushek has done so in this

case. His single, important critique of our key results is the “time trend” argument . Following the summary of our findings below, we present the “time trend”

argument and highlight its flaws. We then discuss how we overcome the problems of the previous studies on which Hanushek bases his opinions. Finally, we discuss how our results differ from previous literature because (a) existing studies suffered from biases, and (b)

the spending increases analyzed in our analysis were spent on more productive inputs than the spending increases examined in other studies.Overview of our findings:In most states, prior to the 1970s, most resources spent on K–12 schooling were raised at the local level, through local property taxes (Howell and Miller 1997; Hoxby 1996). Because the local property tax base is typically higher in areas with higher home values, and there are persistently high levels of residential segregation by socioeconomic status, heavy reliance on local financing contributed to affluent districts’ ability to spend more per student. In response to large within-state differences in per-pupil spending across wealthy/high-income and poor districts, state supreme courts overturned school finance systems in 28 states between 1971 and 2010, and many states implemented legislative reforms that spawned important changes in public education funding. The goal of these school finance reforms (SFRs) was to increase spending levels in low-spending districts, and in many cases to reduce the differences in per-

pupil school-spending levels across districts. By design, some districts experienced increases in per-pupil spending while others may have experienced decreases (Murray, Evans, and Schwab 1998; Card and Payne 2002; Hoxby 2001). Our key finding is that increased per-pupil spending, induced by court-ordered SFRs, increased high school graduation rates, educational attainment, earnings, and family incomes for

children who attended school after these reforms were implemented in affected districts. We find larger effects for low-income children, such that these reforms narrowed adult socioeconomic attainment differences between those raised in low- vs. high-income families.

19. Hanushek’s “time trend” argument is illogical. JJP 15 — C. Kirabo Jackson, Associate Professor of Human Development and Social Policy at Northwestern University, Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research, Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University, et al., with Rucker C. Johnson, Associate Professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California-Berkeley, Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, Faculty Research Fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University, Research Affiliate at the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan, Research Affiliate at the Institute for Poverty Research at the University of Wisconsin, holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Michigan, and Claudia Persico, Assistant Professor of the Economics of Education in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis and Faculty Affiliate of the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Research Affiliate at Northwestern University, holds a Ph.D. in Human Development and Social Policy from the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University, 2015 (“Money Does Matter After All,” Education Next, July 17th, Available Online at http://educationnext.org/money-matter/, Accessed 07-04-2017)The Problem with Hanushek’s “Time Trend” Critique:Now that the reader should have a clear sense of our paper and its implications, we now describe the Hanushek “time trend” argument. Hanushek points out that school spending in the United States has increased substantially between 1970 and present day. As such, he argues that, if our results are correct and school spending really does improve student outcomes (with larger effects for low-income children), outcomes should have improved over time and achievement gaps by income should have been eliminated over this time period. He then argues that any improvements between 1970 and today have been small so that it is unlikely that our conclusion that school spending improves student outcomes is correct.While this “time trend” argument is intuitive, it is flawed for two reasons. The first reason is that it relies on the same flawed understanding of our results outlined above (i.e., that eliminating differences across two broad income groups implies eliminating all differences by socioeconomic status). The second problem with this “time trend” argument is that it is a facile argument based on fuzzy (albeit intuitive) logic. We highlight the problems of his logic below.To see the problems of Hanushek’s logic, consider the following true statistics: between 1960 and 2000 the rate of cigarette smoking for females decreased by more than 30 percent while the rate of deaths by lung cancer increased by more than 50 percent over the same time period.[1] An analysis of these time trends might lead one to infer that smoking reduces lung cancer. However, most informed readers can point out numerous flaws in looking at this time trend evidence and concluding that “if smoking causes lung cancer, then there should have been a large corresponding reduction in cancer rates so that there can be no link between smoking and lung cancer.” However, this is exactly the facile logic

invoked by Hanushek regarding the effect of school spending on student achievement.While there are several problems with this simplistic argument, to avoid going too deeply into the weeds we focus on the most important flaw in this “time trend” argument. Simply put, the “time series” argument will hold only if nothing else has changed between 1970 and present day. It is important to bear in mind that these spending increases occurred against the backdrop of countervailing influences, such as the rise in single-parent families, more highly concentrated poverty, deterioration of neighborhood conditions for low-income families, the exodus of the middle class to the suburbs, mass incarceration, the crack epidemic, changes in migration patterns, and others. Consider just one countervailing factor: the significant rise in segregation by income between neighborhoods over the past four decades. This increased residential segregation was driven mostly by families with school-age children (Owens 2015), a simple reflection that quality of local schooling options is a key driver of segregation. This significant increase in residential sorting by income among families with school-age children would have likely led to far greater disparities in school resources by community socioeconomic status had SFRs not been an effective leveling tool.In short, 1970 and 2010 is not an “apples-to-apples” comparison, so there is no reason to expect that the correlation between aggregate spending and aggregate outcomes over such a long time span will yield anything resembling a “causal” relationship. In fact, the observation that using simple correlations over time is unlikely to yield the true “causal” relationship is exactly what motivated us to follow a different methodological approach. Our method ological approach allows for an “apples-to-apples” comparison and allows us to disentangle the effects of school spending from that of all these other countervailing forces. Though Hanushek has chosen not to discuss the methodological advances in our work , they are important , and methods matter .How We Overcome These Problems to Facilitate “Apples-to-Apples” Comparisons:We make several decisions in order to facilitate more of an apples-to-apples comparison. First, we use fine-grained data on individual students, rather than comparing the entire United States in 1970 to the entire United States in 2010. With these finer-grained data we are able to account for a variety of other factors that may have changed over time such as family structure, childhood poverty, and neighborhood factors. Using these finer grained data, our main approach is to compare the outcomes of individuals with similar background characteristics born in the same school district but who attended public schools during different years (when per-pupil spending levels may have been different) — i.e., an apples-to-apples comparison. However, this is not all that we do to ensure that our results yield real causal relationships.In our paper, we point out that even if one can carefully account for several observable factors (as we do), correlating all actual changes in school spending with changes in student outcomes is unlikely to yield causal relationships. We point out that some spending changes are unrelated to other factors that may obscure the real effect on outcomes (i.e., clean spending changes), while other kinds of spending changes would clearly yield erroneous results (i.e., confounded spending changes). We point out that many of the spending changes analyzed in previous studies may have been of the confounded variety. To give an example of such confounded spending changes, consider the following example. The federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act allocates additional funding to school districts with a high percentage of low-income students, who are more likely to have poor educational outcomes for reasons unrelated to school spending. As such, school districts serving declining neighborhoods are also those that are most likely to receive additional per-pupil spending over time. Such compensatory policies generate a negative relationship between changes in school spending and student outcomes that obscure the true relationship between school spending and student outcomes. We avoid this kind of problem by focusing only on clean spending changes. Specifically, we focus on the relationship between external “shocks” to school spending and long-run adult outcomes. The “shocks” we use are the sudden unanticipated

increases in school spending experienced by predominantly low-spending districts soon after passage of court-mandated SFR.As discussed above, by design, very soon after a court-ordered SFR in a state, some districts experienced sudden unanticipated increases in per-pupil spending (i.e., shocks) while others may have experienced decreases. Our analytic approach compares the outcomes of individuals who attended school before these spending shocks to those of similar individuals from the school district after these spending shocks. The validity of our design relies on the idea that districts that experienced sudden increases in school spending right after the passage of a court-ordered SFR were not already improving in other ways in exactly those same years. For this reason, we spend much time in our work showing that the timing of these spending shocks has nothing to do with underlying neighborhood changes or changes in family characteristics, so that changes in outcomes due to these shocks are likely to reflect a causal relationship. We encourage interested readers to consult the full paper for further detail.Reconciling our results with the Older Literature:Even though we outline the faulty assumptions in Hanushek’s “time trend” argument, in the interest of good social science it is helpful for us to try to reconcile our findings with the simple time-series evidence. As we explain above, our results do not imply that a 22.7 percent increase will eliminate all differences by parental socioeconomic status. However, they do suggest the much more realistic prediction that one might observe some convergence across groups over time as school spending has increased. Indeed this has been the case. For example, Krueger (1998) uses data from the NAEP and documents test score increases over time, with large improvements for disadvantaged children from poor urban areas; the Current Population Survey shows declining dropout rates since 1975 for those from the lowest income quartile (Digest of Education Statistics, NCES 2012). Murnane (2013) finds that high school completion rates have been increasing since 1970 with larger increases for black and Hispanic students; Baum, Ma and Pavea (2013) find that postsecondary enrollment rates have been increasing since the 1980s, particularly for those from poor families. Contrary to Hanushek’s assertions, outcomes have improved. Importantly, these improvements are consistent with increase in school spending playing a key role.Finally, Hanushek proposes three reasons why our estimates (if true) may not track the national time trends very well. His ideas are not

novel — we considered, tested, and addressed them ourselves in the paper and herein. First, he says there may be diminishing marginal returns to schools spending. Indeed we find that this is the case in our study. Areas with the lowest initial spending levels were also those for which increased spending had the most pronounced positive effect. The second reason he cites is that spending induced by the courts might have large effects while spending not related to judicial rulings have small effects. Indeed we find evidence of this also. Specifically, spending increases associated with court-mandated reform are much more strongly related to improvement in measured school inputs (e.g., student-to-teacher ratios, length of the school year) than ordinary spending increases. There are a few explanations for this that we explore in our study. Finally, he proposes that our estimates are wrong. We propose an alternative: the time series evidence Hanushek relies on does not reflect a causal relationship. Indeed in our larger study, we show that simple correlations are obscured by a variety of other factors that also influence student outcomes. We also present numerous pieces of analysis in our larger study that support a causal interpretation of our results.To be clear, we do not think that our study is the final word on the question of whether increasing school spending will improve student outcomes in all contexts. As Hanushek himself concedes “none of this discussion suggests that money never matters. Or that money cannot matter.” Here we will make a similar concession; none of what we show suggests that money always matters. We show that money did matter and that it mattered quite a lot. What our study does is dispels the notion that school spending does not matter, so that one must look only at how it is spent. We find that money does matter and how it is spent matters.

Contrary to Hanushek’s claims, our findings do not let policymakers off the hook. Our findings suggest that it is extremely important that money is allocated effectively and also that it is allocated equitably so that all schools have the resources necessary to help all children succeed .

20. Mehlhorn’s critique of Baker is wrong. * Important Note: Mehlhorn deleted the Medium posts quoted below after this critique was published. Spielberg took screenshots that are included in his PDF. They were OCR’d so that they could be included as text in this card. The posts that were deleted are https://medium.com/@DmitriMehlhorn/money-is-not-the-problem-facing-american-schools-3c321c9db042#.gk6i4gpqu and https://medium.com/@DmitriMehlhorn/that-time-i-trusted-bruce-baker-of-rutgers-university-e597ddd9bc47#.zbck9olz3. Spielberg 16 — Ben Spielberg, Research Assistant at the Full Employment Project at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, holds a B.S. in Mathematical and Computational Sciences from Stanford University, 2016 (“Errors in school funding pieces that demand transparent correction,” 34justice—a scholarly blog, May 1st, Available Online at https://34justice.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/five-corrections-mehlhorn2.pdf, Accessed 07-04-2017)5) The Bruce Baker/Eric Hanushek debate on school funding research :

This is where Mehlhorn really goes off the rails ; his attack on Baker, especially given all of the errors and misleading writing in his own work, is inexcusable . First, he writes the following:

Twitter, of all things, provided me with news to the contrary in August of 2014. Mark Weber, a sincere reform skeptic and public school teacher in New Jersey, goes by the Twitter handle “Jersey Jazzman,” and is a part-time doctoral student at the Rutgers University Graduate School of Education. Weber pointed me to publications written by one of his professors, a fellow named Bruce Baker. Although I had never previously heard of Baker, Weber was not the only person who recommended him. Ben Spielberg, who graduated from my undergraduate alma mater, told me flatly that Baker’s “research is legitimate.” Spielberg, Weber, and other reform skeptics cited Baker often, and indeed Baker was described by AEI’s Rick Hess as the 40th-most cited education scholar in America. Even better, it seemed that Baker was willing to engage folks I knew to be smart and careful, such as Ulrich Boser at the Center for American Progress and Rebecca Sibilia at EdBuild.

Sounds like he didn’t know much about Baker before I told him Baker’s research was legitimate, right? Wrong. For reference, the Twitter conversation with me that Mehlhorn linked happened on July 31, 2015. Mehlhorn tells a story in which he is initially wowed by Baker’s research. He writes:

Baker’s papers blew me away. They totally reversed the narrative. For instance, Baker pointed me to a 2012 piece he wrote called “Does Money Matter in Education,” which concluded that school spending is important and impactful for students. This conclusions was the opposite of the consensus in academia when I had been a student in the 1990s. How had the prior research been so wrong? What had happened in the previous 15 years? Well, Baker cited Northwestern University’s Larry Hedges, who re-reviewed Hanushek’s 1986 survey of evidence using “quality control measures” to exclude some studies and change some interpretations. According to Baker, this settled the matter: “by the early 2000s, the cloud of uncertainty conjured by Hanushek in 1986 had largely lifted in the aftermath of the various, more rigorous studies that followed.”I was surprised, but frankly relieved. As I wrote in response to Baker at the time, “Thank heavens. Someone who actually talks evidence. Talk soon.” Shortly thereafter, I read another piece from Baker regarding implementation of high-stakes testing, and frankly his analysis was solid. I assumed that this level of analysis was typical of Baker’s work, and was further relieved that a high-profile reform skeptic was taking the time to do careful research. As I wrote to him, “Bruce, your facts & analysis R best I’ve seen on UR side. Wish AFT/NEA pushed you, not smears.” I circulated Baker’s work to elevate that approach.

The quotes above came on August 9, 2014 and August 11, 2014. But then, according to Mehlhorn, he digs deeper and realizes Baker is not to be trusted:

But wait, something smells fishy The first clues that something was fishy came as I dove deeper into Baker’s body of work. The highly respected Ulrich Boser had written a report on waste and inefficiency in school spending, and Baker had written a rebuttal. Baker’s rebuttal was, as I wrote to him, “More strident, Something was starting to smell fishy less compelling than UR usual.” I was being delicate; Baker’s rebuttal was full of personal insults and exclamation points. Disappointing for an alleged scholar.

Then, I read a Baker critique of Mathematica policy research regarding the effectiveness of KIPP charter schools. Baker’s critique was terrible, a long list of hand-waving attacks that seemed to call into question the very possibility of actual empirical research in education. As I wrote to him, the methodology of his approach seemed like that of climate denialists, whose attacks often are a “kritik” of the very idea of research. Things got worse still when I started to read Baker’s work about teachers’ unions, a subject about which I had substantial personal exposure from visiting state legislators in places where unions were active. As I wrote to Baker in response to a blog of his on the subject, his thumb appeared to be on the scale of the internal workings of his models. His methodology on unions was so sloppy it seemed deliberate.

His “less compelling than UR usual” comment comes on August 12, 2014, three days after he apparently first encountered Baker (Mehlhorn seemingly reads very quickly, which may explain his penchant for missing important details ). The comment on the Mathematica critique came on August 17, 2014. In between that comment and the comment Mehlhorn made about teachers unions on October 9, 2014, he and I had what I believe to be our first ever interaction – on September 8, 2014. Baker was not mentioned during that conversation, as far as I can tell. Finally, the Jackson et al. study came out and Mehlhorn went on a fact-finding mission. He had an epiphany:

In 2015, Rucker Johnson and others published an NBER analysis of the impacts of school spending. The NBER report was broadly sympathetic to Baker’s 2012 claims that money can matter, so I read the report with interest. Wait a minute... the 2015 NBER report, entirely focused on the question of “does money matter in education,” did not once mention the Bruce Baker publication from 3 years earlier with the title “Does Money Matter in Education?” That seemed odd. Even more odd, the NBER paper referred to studies from 1995 and 1996 that showed school spending doesn’t lead to better results. Wait, what? Wasn’t that the period of time that Baker reviewed, when he wrote that the “cloud of uncertainty” created by Hanushek in 1986 had lifted based on subsequent work? Why didn’t Baker mention those 1995 and 1996 studies by other scholars? With my antennae finally up, I dug into Baker’s 2012 claims more fully. As it turns out. Baker omitted so much context from his report that his conclusion borders on outright mendacity. For instance, Baker chooses not to mention that Hanushek wrote several peer-reviewed rebuttals to Hedges’ work, including that they engaged in “statistical manipulations ... to overturn prevailing conclusions,” and that they “misinterpret the implications of their analysis [and,] through a series of analytical choices, systematically bias their results toward the conclusions they are seeking.” Baker wrote a conclusion that “uncertainty” created by Hanushek “lifted” after 1986, without even deigning to mention that Hanushek didn’t agree? Baker’s presentation of this conclusion was so skewed that later scholars on the exact same subject didn’t even mention Baker’s paper?

Judging from a comment on it, the article Mehlhorn mentioned came out on or before July 8, 2015, more than three weeks ahead of the conversation he and I had in which I asserted that Baker's research was legitimate. By his own admission and given his extremely fast reviews of other research, Mehlhorn clearly didn't trust Baker at this point - it is absurd of him to imply, as he does in the piece, that he was an unsuspecting victim of my encouragement to read Baker's work.What about Mehlhorn's critiques of Baker, which also appeared in his first "rebuttal" to my piece (see below)?

The conclusions of Professor Bruce Baker: Even more than Jackson and his team., Ben relies heavily on articles published by Bruce Baker of Rutgers University’s Graduate School of Education. This reliance is common among reform skeptics, as Baker reaches the most anti-reform conclusions to be found within mainstream academia. Particularly cited by Ben is Baker’s 2012 editorial published by the Albert Shanker Institute in which he writes that “by the early 2000s, the cloud of uncertainty conjured by Hanushek in 1986 had largely lifted in the aftermath of the various, more rigorous studies that followed. ” Baker justifies this claim largely by citing Northwestern University’s Larry Hedges, who re-reviewed Hanushek’s studies “quality control measures.” Reading Baker’s paper by itself, it is understandable why Ben finds a clear academic consensus that money matters. The problem is that Baker omits so much that his conclusion borders on outright mendacity. For instance, Baker chooses not to mention that Hanushek wrote several peer-reviewed rebuttals to Hedges’ work. One of Hanushek’s responses could have been written with Ben in mind: “Hedges, Laine, and Greenwald commit the larger error of asking the wrong question. This problem tends to get lost in their statistical manipulations and their zeal to overturn prevailing conclusions about the effectiveness of pure resource policies in promoting student achievement.” A later paper from Hanushek goes into great detail about how Hedges and company “misinterpret the implications of their analysis [and,] through a series of analytical choices, systematically bias their results toward the conclusions they are seeking.” While Hanushek’s

rebuttal is devastating, the more important point is that Baker simply pretends it does not exist - he paints a story of academic consensus that is entirely false. In assessing Baker, it is worth noting that serious education researchers tend to not even mention Baker. Jackson and his team, for instance, write an entire paper that “money matters”, and don’t once mention Baker’s 2012 editorial. Rather, they refer to studies from 1995 and 1996 (which Baker ignores) that school spending doesn’t lead to better results. The reason Baker gets so little play in serious education academia is because he writes editorials, not studies. His analyses are designed to achieve his intended results, and he does this by making subjective and one-sided decisions about what to include and what to ignore. [This is a point Dropout Nation Editor RiShawn Biddle hit upon four years ago.] This is expected for expert witnesses at trials, but it is disturbing for someone who pretends to be an academic, and is not transparent that he gets paid for reports by parties with a direct financial stake in his outcomes. This problem was underscored in a 2011 tape-recorded conversation in which Baker said he would play with data, manipulate the questions he asked, and “pull things in and out” of his models “to tell the most compelling story” in exchange for a substantial research grant. This telephone conversation, including Baker’s own partially exculpatory comments, appears in full at about the 3-minute mark of this video clip. [Baker offers a rather lengthy explanation and defense of what happened.] None of this automatically invalidates Baker’s conclusions, but most of his research suffers the same kinds of glaring deficiencies I just mentioned regarding his 2012 Shanker Institute paper. Some day, someone may decide to write a point-by-point review of Baker’s editorials, but for now the main point is to take his sweeping anti-reform conclusions with a heaping of salt.

Well, for starters, after Mehlhorn wrote that first rebuttal, I noted the following:1) Mehlhorn devotes a lot of space to attacking Bruce Baker for editorializing. Baker certainly does have strong opinions, but I actually think it’s nice that he’s transparent about his perspective - all researchers have biases, and it’s in many ways preferable to know about them upfront. Baker’s work is strong and consistent with other recent research. The research Mehlhorn relies on - from Eric Hanushek, a member of the Right-wing Hoover Institution (note that Mehlhorn does not once mention Hanushek’s affiliation and biases) - is typically much older and a clear outlier (as I explained above).

In his anti-Baker follow-up, however, Mehlhorn still mentioned that Hanushek was at Stanford but once again conveniently forgot to mention his affiliation with the Hoover Institution (since Mehlhorn is, like me, a Stanford alum, he

should know that there is a huge difference between "Stanford" and "Hoover"). Mehlhorn also

fails to mention that Hanushek's conclusions have been criticized by many other well-respected researchers over the years; here is one example from 2001 and another from 2002 (though as the second link notes, there isn't nearly as much of a chasm between Hanushek's academic research and other research on the subject as Hanushek's policy advocacy - against increased investments in schools - makes it seem).Note also that Hanushek accepts large payments to testify against increases in school funding even when he hasn’t analyzed relevant state-level data .

Mehlhorn must not have read Baker's paper as closely as he said he did,

either; his assertion that Baker ignores Hanushek's rebuttals to Hedges (who wrote his paper with Rob Greenwald and Richard Laine when they were all at the

University of Chicago) is false . Baker mentions them in a footnote , as shown below:

16 Greenwald and colleagues explain: “studies in the universe Hanushek (1989) constructed were assessed for quality. Of the 38 studies, 9 were discarded due to weaknesses identified in the decision rules for inclusion described below. While the remaining 29 studies were retained, many equations and coefficients failed to satisfy the decision rules we employed. Thus, while more than three quarters of the studies were retained, the number of coefficients from Hanushek’s universe was reduced by two thirds.” (p. 363)Greenwald and colleagues further explain that: “Hanushek’s synthesis method, vote counting, consists of categorizing, by significance and direction, the relationships between school resource inputs and student outcomes (including but not limited to achievement). Unfortunately, vote-counting is known to be a rather insensitive procedure for summarizing results. It is now rarely used in areas of empirical research where sophisticated synthesis of research is expected.” (p. 362)

Hanushek (1997) provides his rebuttal to some of these arguments, and Hanushek returns to his “uncertainty position: ‘The close to 400 studies of student achievement demonstrate that there is not a strong or consistent relationship between student performance and school resources, at least after variations in family inputs are taken into account.” (p. 141)Hanushek, E.A. (1997) Assessing the Effects of School Resources on Student Performance: An update. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 19 (2) 141-164See also:Hanushek, Eric A. ’’Money Might Matter Somewhere: A Response to Hedges, Laine and Greenwald.” Educational Researcher, May 1994,23, pp. 5-8.

Here are the other studies Baker cites before stating that "the cloud of uncertainty created by Hanushek in 1986 had largely lifted:"

18 Wenglinsky, H. (1997) How Money Matters: The effect of school district spending on academic achievement.Sociology of Education 70 (3) 221-23719 Taylor. C. (1998) Does Money Matter? An Empirical Study Introducing Resource Costs and Student Needs intoEducational Production Function Analysis. In U.S. Department of Education. National Center for Education Statistics. Developments in School Finance, 1997.20 Baker, B.D. (2001) Can flexible non-linear modeling tell us anything new about educational productivity?Economics of Education Review 20 (1) 81-92.Figlio, D. N. (1999). Functional form and the estimated effects of school resources. Economics of Education Review, 18 (2), 242-252.Dewey, J., Husted, T., Kenny, L. (2000) The ineffectiveness of school inputs: a product of misspecification. Economics of education Review 19 (1) 27-45

Oh, and by the way, those studies from 1995 and 1996 that Baker ostensibly ignored? He didn't . Here's the section, on pages 3 and 4, where he references the 1996 study that Jackson et al. cited:

In short, while family background certainly matters most, schools matter as well. Furthermore, there exist substantive differences in school quality that explain a substantial portion of the variation in student outcomes. Subsequent studies using alternative data sources to explored the relationship between schooling quality and various outcomes, including the economic rate of return to schooling - e.g., future earnings. For example, David Card and Alan Krueger (1992) studied the relationship between school quality measures, including pupil to teacher ratios and relative teacher pay, on the rate of return to education for men bom between 1920 and 1949. Card and Krueger found that men educated in states with higher-quality schools have a higher return to additional years of schooling. Rates of return were also higher for individuals from states with better-educated teachers.12Similarly, Julian Betts (1996) provided an extensive review of the literature that attempts to link measures of schooling quality and adult earnings, including Card and Krueger’s study. Betts explains that, while the overall results of such studies were mixed, they were generally positive. More specifically, he pointed to more positive results for studies evaluating the association between district-level spending and earnings, as opposed to those attempting to identify a link between school-level resources and earnings, for which results are murkier.

This summary highlights a different aspect of Betts' paper than Jackson et al. chose to, which may be why Mehlhorn missed it, but it is accurate. Back in 1996, Betts found both that "[t]he studies that measure spending by state averages almost always find a positive association between educational expenditures and average earnings" and that "when researchers have attempted to identify the specific components of total educational spending that most influence earnings, most studies found either no link or a positive link that is not robust to changes in specification or subsample." Baker highlighted the former - money matters - while Jackson et al. highlighted the latter - at the time, the literature wasn't clear about money mattered and how it could be used productively.Mehlhorn also asserts that Jackson et al. didn't cite Baker's work in their paper "because he writes editorials , not studies . His analyses are designed to achieve his intended results, and he does this by making subjective and one-sided decisions about what to include and what to ignore."The more likely explanation seemed to me to be that Baker's review was a review , not original academic research, and that Jackson et al. were citing only research that their findings called into question . I spoke with Jackson and he confirmed this intuition; he respects Baker's work and has no issues with Baker's review (which Baker recently updated).

Finally, Mehlhorn tries to impugn Baker 's integrity by citing the work of James O'Keefe, a notoriously dishonest "conservative activist" known for "deliberately misrepresenting" info rmation about the individuals he targets and releasing "selectively edited videotape" (O'Keefe also enjoys breaking the law while pursuing his entrapment schemes). Feel

free to read the emails yourself: Baker clearly did not agree to anything unethical.

I believe Mehlhorn should both issue a correction and apologize to Baker for inaccurately maligning his character.

Negative Evidence21. Funding does not improve outcomes — empirically proven. Hanushek 15 — Eric A. Hanushek, Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, Chairman of the Executive Board of the Texas Schools Project and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Texas at Dallas, Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, former Commissioner of the Equity and Excellence Commission at the U.S. Department of Education, former Professor of Economics and Political Science at the University of Rochester, holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2015 (“Not Enough Value to Justify More of the Same,” Room for Debate—a New York Times scholarly blog, March 26th, Available Online at https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/03/26/is-improving-schools-all-about-money/not-enough-value-to-justify-more-of-the-same, Accessed 06-07-2017)It is hard getting around the historic facts. Real per pupil spending has more than doubled in the past 40 years, but the math ematics and reading scores of 17-year-olds have barely budged .

We must recognize that more of the same is unlikely to yield better results – and by implication reform through spending is not the way to improvement.

Advocates of more spending frequently attempt to trivialize the position of critics by twisting it into “money does not matter.” That statement is, of course, silly, because schools must pay salaries, buy equipment and run a variety of programs that do indeed require money. But in simple terms, how money is spent is much more important than how much is spent . The problem has been that schools have not systematically used additional funds in ways that lead to improvements in student outcomes — and there is no reason to expect better choices in the future.Supporters of added funding — as opposed to more fundamental reform in how money is used — frequently argue that it is other forces that prevent schools from doing better: Their students are more disadvantaged or there is more need for special education, etc. Even generous allowances for spending associated with educational mandates do not explain or justify the more than doubled spending over the past four decades, without any gains in achievement.To an economist, a central issue is incentives for school personnel. There are no extra rewards for teaching well or consequences for teaching badly. If we simply raise all salaries for school personnel — for both effective and ineffective educators — we should not be surprised when student achievement does not change. If we further reduce teacher-pupil ratios, even after the disappointing results of the past two decades, we should not be surprised that spending rises with no gain in achievement.Given decades of unproductive spending increases, it is a mistake to lead with greater spending and hope for the best .

22. Empirical evidence disproves “funding key.” Mehlhorn 15 — Dmitri Mehlhorn, Senior Fellow at the Institute for Education Policy at Johns Hopkins University, Senior Fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, holds a J.D. from Yale Law School and an M.P.P. in Education Policy from Harvard University, 2015 (“You Can’t Spin School Funding,” Dropout Nation—an online education journal, November 5th, Available Online at http://dropoutnation.net/2015/11/05/you-cant-spin-school-funding/, Accessed 07-04-2017)The evidence is from other nations, and from recent history, is clear: money is not the primary problem facing America’s schools. A growing body of evidence from within the U.S. confirms this point. Since all three of these benchmarks (international,

historical, and intra-American) are independent proof points, reform skeptics would need to discredit all three to make their case. Simply put, Ben demonstrates that he cannot persuasively discredit any of them.How much does the United States spend on education? The starting point, which Ben buries behind a number of tangents, is that America spends more than any society in history . All credible sources tell roughly the same story . Ben did not like the source I used in my first column, so let’s use the National Center for Education Statistics. It reports a $621 billion total national investment in public elementary and secondary schools for 2011-2012.We spend more than other countries spend, yet get weaker results. The international story has been repeatedly verified: Compared to other nations, the United States spends more on each student, and the students get less. Ben is right that we should try to compare apples to apples, but the best efforts to do so repeat this conclusion. An older, thorough study by McKinsey & Company in 2007, noted that Singapore achieves top performance while spending less per pupil than 27 of 30 OECD countries. More recently, NCES says we spend $12,401 per pupil, about 35 percent more than the per-pupil average for the industrialized world. In case after case, and in study after study, the best school systems do more with less than America and its public education systems.Ben’s responds that education spending should be measured as a share of Gross Domestic Product, rather than as an absolute number. In this, Ben forgets what we are discussing: whether schools in America have enough money to succeed. His preferred metric – education spending divided by GDP – has uses, but is not relevant to whether schools have enough resources.To see why, consider that America’s GDP at the start of 1992 was about $9 trillion in today’s dollars. Under Bill Clinton, GDP growth averaged 3.8 percent, while under George W. Bush it fell to 1.6 percent. Imagine a “Clinton scenario” where we had 3.8 percent growth from 1992 until today, and a “GWB scenario” where we had 1.6 percent growth from 1992 until today. The difference in GDP would be $22 trillion vs. $13 trillion. Under these two scenarios, if actual dollars in schools were exactly the same, “education spending as a percent of GDP” would be appear 70 percent higher under George W. Bush. Thus, by Ben’s metric, the fastest way to get school spending right is to tank the economy. [This does, perhaps, explain Ben’s support for Bernie Sanders.]We spend a lot more than we used to, without commensurate results : America’s schools today spend about 2.5 times per pupil what they spent in 1970, notwithstanding a small per-pupil dip since 2008. Ben acknowledges “the fact that K-12 spending has risen in inflation-adjusted dollar value terms over the past 45 years,” but then waves that away by saying that “real spending on practically everything has increased in dollar terms since the 1970.” That statement is jarringly untrue.Over that time period, per-unit prices have plummeted in many areas, including appliances, telecommunications, electronics, computers, televisions, and audio-visual devices. Some sectors have taken advantage: for instance, U.S. military spending has increased only 10 percent since 1970, while dramatically improving its comparative and absolute effectiveness. True, declining costs in some sectors have been offset by price increases in other areas, but this overall mix is called “inflation.” By using “inflation-adjusted” dollars, we account for the interplay of cost increases and cost declines. If we ignored inflation, the increase in dollars would be 14 times rather than merely 2.5 times.Results for America’s schools have improved only slightly since 1970s, despite spending more than doubling . At face value, this suggests that funding is not the primary constraint facing America’s schools.

23. There is no correlation between funding and outcomes — comprehensive study proves. Coulson 14 — Andrew J. Coulson, Director of the Center for Educational Freedom at the Cato Institute, former Senior Fellow in Education Policy at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, 2014 (“State Education Trends: Academic Performance and Spending over the Past 40 Years,” Cato Institute Policy

Analysis Number 746, March 18th, Available Online at https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa746.pdf, Accessed 07-06-2017, p. 57)ConclusionAcademic performance and preparation for college success are widely shared goals, and so it is useful for the public and policymakers to know how they have varied over time at the state level. The present paper estimates these trends by adjusting state average SAT scores for variation in student participation rates and demographic factors known to be associated with those scores.In general, the findings are not encouraging. Adjusted state SAT scores have declined by an average of 3 percent. This echoes the picture of stagnating achievement among American 17-year-olds painted by the Long Term Trends portion of the N ational Assessment of Educational Progress, a series of

tests administered to a nationally representative sample of students since 1970. That disappointing record comes despite a more-than-doubling in inflation-adjusted per pupil public-school spending over the same period (the average state spending increase was 120 percent). Consistent with those

patterns, there has been essentially no correlation between what states have spent on education and their measured academic outcomes. In other words, America’s educational productivity appears to have collapsed, at least as measured by the NAEP and the SAT.

That is remarkably unusual. In virtually every other field, productivity has risen over this period thanks to the adoption of countless technological advances—advances that, in many cases, would seem ideally

suited to facilitating learning. And yet, surrounded by this torrent of progress, education has remained anchored to the riverbed, watching the rest of the world rush past it.

Not only have dramatic spending increases been unaccompanied by improvements in performance, the same is true of the

occasional spending declines experienced by some states. At one time or another over the past four decades, Alaska, California, Florida, and New York all experienced multi-year periods over which real spending fell substantially (20 percent or more of their 1972 expenditure levels). And

yet, none of these states experienced noticeable declines in adjusted SAT scores —either contemporaneously or lagged by a few years. Indeed, their score trends seem entirely disconnected from their rising and falling levels of spending .Two generations seems a long time for a field to stand outside of history, particularly when those generations have witnessed so many reforms aimed at improving education. Perhaps it’s time to ask if there are inherent features in our approach to schooling that prevent it from enjoying the progress typical in other fields.

24. JJP is an outlier. Mehlhorn 15 — Dmitri Mehlhorn, Senior Fellow at the Institute for Education Policy at Johns Hopkins University, Senior Fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, holds a J.D. from Yale Law School and an M.P.P. in Education Policy from Harvard University, 2015 (“You Can’t Spin School Funding,” Dropout Nation—an online education journal, November 5th, Available Online at http://dropoutnation.net/2015/11/05/you-cant-spin-school-funding/, Accessed 07-04-2017)

The conclusions of Stanford’s Hanushek and NBER’s Jackson, Johnson, and Persico: Ben cites a 2015 National Bureau of Economic Research paper by a team led by Kirabo Jackson which assessed the effects of court-mandated school funding increases on student results in the 1970s and 1980s. In the spirit of helping Ben and other reform skeptics stay focused on relevance, let’s just take everything that Jackson et al. state at face value:

1. Their result establishes a caveat to established prior research that money does not usually drive better student outcomes. As they wrote, prior national studies “found little association” between spending and results, citing reports dating back to the Coleman Report of 1966 and includes studies by Stanford’s Eric Hanushek, Julian R. Betts of University of California, San Diego, and Jeffrey T. Grogger of University of Chicago.2. The Jackson study shows results from a narrow fact set , in which short-term spending increases were disproportionately used to benefit student instruction. They explicitly note that this is not typical for K-12 spending increases : “how the money is spent matters a lot,” and “our evidence suggests that exogenous spending increases went toward more productive inputs than endogenous spending increases.” This comment supports the hypothesis of

education reformers: that additional resources for public schools will be quickly captured by the K-12 bureaucracy rather than being spent on behalf of students. Again from Jackson and his team: “money per se will not improve student outcomes” because, for instance, “using the funds to pay for lavish faculty retreats will likely not have a positive effect on student outcomes.” This directly mirrors the anecdote that headlines my original piece, in which the Fairfax County Public Schools’ lobbying campaign for additional funds omitted the fact that school leaders had just voted themselves a 60 percent pay increase.3. The Jackson fact base also reveals diminishing returns to funding increases. In other words, an extra dollar in 1970, when schools spent

$4,500 in today’s dollars, might have a lot more impact than an extra dollar today, when schools spend more than twice as much. This was pointed out by Hanushek in his response to their study that “by implication, spending today might be expected to have a much smaller impact than they estimate.” Jackson team’s conceded that: “Indeed we find that this is the case in our study. Areas with the lowest initial spending levels were also those for which increased spending had the most pronounced positive effect.”Let’s review to make sure we don’t lose track of the argument. Even if we only use the words from the authors of Ben’s best evidence, we can conclude

three things: First, that the Jackson study is an exception to substantial scholarship in the other direction. Secondly, that their study is limited to a specific type of spending that is atypical in K-12 budgets. And finally, that their study is based on data from a much lower initial starting point, and their own results suggest that adding money today might have a substantially diminished result.

25. The JJP study is methodologically flawed. DeAngelis 17 — Corey A. DeAngelis, Policy Analyst at the Center for Educational Freedom at the Cato Institute, Distinguished Doctoral Fellow and Ph.D. student in Education Policy at the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville, Policy Advisor for the Heartland Institute, holds an M.A. in Economics from the University of Texas-San Antonio, 2017 (“Education Dollars Should Matter—but Do They?,” Cato At Liberty—the Cato Institute’s blog, June 8th, Available Online at https://www.cato.org/blog/education-dollars-should-matter, Accessed 06-09-2017)

Education reporters such as Chalkbeat’s Matt Barnum continue to cling to the idea that pouring exorbitant resources into an inefficient school system can make a sustainable difference in the lives of America’s children. To support the claim, Barnum points to a couple of recent studies examining the association between court-ordered education spending increases and student outcomes.

Jackson, Johnson, and Perisco (2016) conclude that an annual 10% increase in per pupil spending for all 12 years of schooling leads to an increase of about a third of a year of completed education. Similarly, Lafortune, Rothstein, and Schanzenbach (2016) find that court-ordered spending increases improve test scores for the least-advantaged students by a little under a hundredth of a standard deviation per year.

However, both of these studies suffer from important methodological issues that limit their ability to identify a strong causal relationship between education dollars and student outcomes.Methodological ProblemsObviously, court-ordered spending reforms are not random events, so using them to predict educational expenditures still results in biased estimates. The public’s desire to improve education in a given location likely leads simultaneously to court-ordered spending increases and political pressures to improve school quality.Perhaps more concerning is that event studies like the ones Barnum cites capture an entire package of educational reforms during a particular period . For some reason, authors of these types of studies have chosen to point to spending as the cause of the altered outcomes . However, other reforms such as testing accountability, pay-for-performance, and educational choice happened during the study timeframes .Costs vs. BenefitsFor the sake of argument, let’s assume that the detected effects could actually be attributed to educational dollars.The study by L afortune, R othstein, and S chanzenbach finds that a large court-ordered spending increase only raises test scores by seven-thousandths of a standard deviation per year . For the most-advantaged students, the effects are zero. The fact that the detected impacts are trivial suggests that authors are simply picking up the bias generated by their empirical techniques .

26. Overwhelming counter-evidence disproves JJP. Greene 15 — Jay P. Greene, Department Head and 21st Century Chair in Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, former Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University, 2015 (“Does School Spending Matter After All?,” Jay P. Greene’s blog—a scholarly education blog, May 29th, Available Online at https://jaypgreene.com/2015/05/29/does-school-spending-matter-after-all/, Accessed 06-25-2017)This is the question raised by a new study by C. Kirabo Jackson, Rucker C. Johnson and Claudia Persico in Education Next. Jackson, et al claim to have up-ended decades of school finance research by finding a link between school spending and improved student outcomes. After reading that article and an earlier, more detailed version posted on the NBER web site, I find nothing to persuade me to

abandon the long-standing and well-established finding that simply providing schools with more resources does not improve student outcomes .Let’s remember how well-established this finding is by noting that Eric Hanushek conducted a comprehensive review of the literature and concluded :

…the research indicates little consistent relationship between resources to schools and student achievement. Much of the research considers how resources affect student achievement as measured by standardized test scores. These scores are strongly related to individual incomes and to national economic performance, making them a good proxy for longer run economic impacts. But, the evidence – whether from aggregate school outcomes, econometric investigations, or a

variety of experimental or quasiexperimental approaches – suggests that pure resource policies that do not change incentives are unlikely to be effective. (p. 866)

Jackson, et al acknowledge that past research has failed to find a link between school resources and student outcomes:

Coleman found that variation in school resources (as measured by per-pupil spending and student-to-teacher ratios) was unrelated to variation in student achievement on standardized tests. In the decades following the release of the Coleman Report, the effect of school spending on student academic performance was studied extensively, and Coleman’s conclusion was widely upheld.

But they believe that past research was flawed in two important respects. First, test scores may be a weak indicator of later-life success, so it would be better to look at stronger measures, like educational attainment, employment, and earnings. Second, they believe that past studies of school spending may suffer from an endogeneity problem. That is, extra money has tended to go to schools facing challenges. The failure to find a link between more resources and better achievement may be because schools with a weaker future trajectory are the ones more likely to get more money. So, the causal arrow may be going in the wrong direction. Weak performance may be causing more resources rather than more resources causing weak performance.Jackson, et al solve the first issue by focusing on longer-term student outcomes, like educational attainment and earnings. They claim to have a solution to the second problem by finding a type of spending increase that is unrelated to the expected trajectory of school performance. Court-ordered spending, they say, is exogenous, while regular legislative increases in spending are endogenous.The surprising findings of the Jackson, et al article hinge entirely on this claim that court-ordered spending is exogenous. Looking at attainment and earnings by itself does not produce a different result than past research that has focused on test scores. The thing that allows Jackson, et al to find that spending is linked to better student outcomes is the fact that they do not examine actual spending increases. Instead, they predict changes in spending based on court-orders and use that predicted spending in place of the actual spending.This instrumental variable technique developed by James Heckman, however, only works if the instrument is in fact exogenous. That is, court-ordered spending has to be unrelated to the future trajectory of school performance. Given how critical this point is to the entire article, you might think Jackson, et al would spend a fair amount of energy to justifying the exogeneity of court-ordered spending. They do not.It is completely mysterious to me why we should believe that court-ordered spending differs from legislatively-originated spending in the likelihood that it is linked to the expected future trajectory of school performance. That is, schools facing challenges are just as likely to get extra money if the spending originates in the courts or in the legislature. If we are concerned that the causal arrow is going in the wrong direction in that weak performance causes more money rather than the other way around, we

should have that concern just as much whether the motivation for the money came from the court or the legislature.Jackson, et al do not make a proper case for the exogeneity of court-ordered spending other than to describe it as a “shock” to school spending. But there is nothing more shocking about spending that originates in the courts than in the legislature. Court cases take years to develop, be decided, and complete appeals. And then they have to be implemented by legislative action. The timing of court-ordered spending is no more surprising to schools than regular legislative spending. Nor is the amount of spending change necessarily more dramatic than those originating in legislatures. The passage of ESEA and its re-authorizations infused large amounts of money into schools.Jackson et al need to convince us that court-ordered spending is exogenous to get their unusual result. If they just used conventional methods, they would confirm the wide-spread finding that extra money does not improve outcomes. As they describe it:

We confirm that our approach generates significantly different results than those that use observed increases in school spending, by comparing our results to those we would have obtained had we used actual rather than predicted increases as our measure of changes in district spending. For all outcomes, the results based simply on observed increases in school spending are orders of magnitude smaller than our estimates based on predicted SFR-induced spending increases, and most are statistically insignificant.

But Jackson, et al fail to justify the claim that court-ordered spending is exogneous on which their entire article depends nor does such a claim seem plausible.But even if you were to somehow believe that court-ordered spending is exogenous, it would still be unwise to jump to the conclusion that we now know money matters and should open the resource spigots to K-12 education. First, the past research Hanushek reviewed includes studies that do not suffer from either of the concerns raised by Jackson, et al. That is, some of those studies examine later-life outcomes for students and not just test scores and some of those studies rely on experimental methods with which there is no problem with causation. Why should we disregard those studies for this one new study even if we were to ignore the concerns I’ve raised above?Second, Jackson, et al are examining the effect of court-ordered spending in the 1970s when spending levels in real terms were much lower and variation in spending across districts within states was much higher. It’s quite a leap to think that more money now would have the same effect as then. To my surprise, Bruce Baker made this same point in response to the Jackson, et al article in comments to Education Week:

“[E]xploring such [far-apart] outcomes, while a fun academic exercise, is of limited use for informing policy,” he wrote in an email to Education Week. “Among other things, these are changes that occurred under very different conditions than today.”

Mr. Baker also disagreed with the researchers’ caveat that similar changes might have a much smaller effect if introduced today, in part because total school funding nationwide increased by 175 percent over 43 years, from an average of $4,612 per student in 1967 to about $12,772 per student in 2010, as measured in 2012 dollars.So does school spending matter after all? I think the answer is still clearly “no.”

27. JJP is wrong — spending increases don’t improve outcomes. Hanushek 15 — Eric A. Hanushek, Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, Chairman of the Executive Board of the Texas Schools Project and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Texas at Dallas, Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, former Commissioner of the Equity and Excellence Commission at the U.S. Department of Education, former Professor of Economics and Political Science at the University of Rochester, holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2015 (“Does Money Matter After All?,” Jay P. Greene’s Blog (guest post), July 7th, Available Online at https://jaypgreene.com/2015/07/07/does-money-matter-after-all/, Accessed 06-14-2017)Considerable prior research has failed to find a consistent relationship between school spending and student performance, making skepticism about such a relationship the conventional wisdom. Given that skepticism, new studies that purport to find a systematic relationship between school spending and student performance get disproportionate attention.There is in fact great demand for results linking funding with favorable outcomes. Knowing that a strong relationship existed would mean that policy makers outside of the schools – legislatures, governors, and courts – only have to concern themselves with how much money was provided to schools and not with how money was used. And, meeting our education challenges by providing more money appears from history to be easier than pursuing more fundamental changes in schools.Kirabo Jackson, Rucker C. Johnson, and Claudia Persico offer a new study suggesting that a clear money-performance relationship exists if you just look in the right place. Their overarching conclusion is that “methods matter.” Their discovery of a money-performance relationship is attributed to analyzing the effects of spending that emanates from court decisions (exogenous variation in spending), tracing the effect of this spending to long run outcomes (completed schooling and wages), and focusing on the right subgroup (disadvantaged students).From a methodological viewpoint, details are important here. How court decisions are dated given long and repeated legal involvement in many states; how the spending reaction to court decisions is measured; whether the court decisions are unrelated to the character of schools before court involvement; and how court-mandated spending differs from other increased spending are a few of the details. Nevertheless, while these are important methodological issues, it is more useful to focus on the substance of their findings.Jackson, Johnson, and Persico reach the following conclusions about the impact of a 10 percent increase in spending for all 12 years of schooling: 1) It would increase years of schooling by 0.44 years for poor children and by an insignificant 0.075 years for non-poor children, implying that a spending increase of 22.7 percent would eliminate the average education gap; 2) It would increase high school graduation rates by 11.6 percentage points for poor children and 6 percentage points for non-poor children; 3) It would increase subsequent family incomes by 16.4 percent for poor children and zero for non-poor children; 4) It would reduce subsequent adult poverty rates by 6.8 percentage points for poor children and zero for non-poor children.Their analysis covers schooling experiences for the period 1970-2010. Thus, it is useful to connect these estimates to actual funding patterns over the period. Between 1970 and 1990, real expenditure per pupil increased not by 10 percent but by over 84 percent. By 2000, this comparison with 1970 topped 100 percent, and it reached almost 150 percent by 2010. No amount of adjustment for special education, LEP, or what have you will make these extraordinary increases in school funding go away.If a ten percent increase yields the results calculated by Jackson,

Johnson, and Persico, shouldn’t we have found all gaps gone (and even reversed) by now due to the actual funding increases? And, even with

small effects on the non-poor, shouldn’t we have seen fairly dramatic improvements in overall educational and labor market outcomes? In reality, in the face of dramatic past increases in school funding, the gaps in attainment, high school graduation, and family poverty have remained significant, largely resisting any major improvement. And, the stagnating labor market performance for broad swaths of the population has captured considerable recent public and scholarly attention.

What could reconcile these apparent inconsistencies? Here are some possibilities:* There might be sharply diminishing returns to spending so that their estimates apply most clearly in 1970 when spending (in 2011-12 $’s) was

just $4,500 as opposed to 2010 when spending was $11,000. Thus, by implication, spending today might be expected to have a much smaller impact than they estimate.* Only spending induced by the courts might have the large impacts they identify, with spending not related to judicial rulings having a negligible impact. The likelihood of this is a little questionable since, with a few exceptions such as NJ and WY, the courts have done little to look into how any legislature responds in terms of specific spending programs. But, if true, normal spending increases by state legislatures and by local taxpayers would not be expected to have any impact on outcomes .

* The estimates of J ackson, Johnson, and Persico might simply be very wrong.Maybe there are other ways to reconcile the Jackson, Johnson, and Persico estimates with the aggregate data on spending and outcomes. But in the end they themselves state what is now commonly accepted: How money is spent matters. Indeed, by simple consideration of their evidence, how money is spent is more important than how much is spent.Of course, it is always important to recognize that none of this discussion suggests that money never matters. Or that money cannot matter. It just says that the outcomes observed over the past half century – no matter how massaged – do not suggest that just throwing money at schools is likely to be a policy that solve s the significant U.S. schooling problems seen in the levels and distribution of outcomes . We really cannot get around the necessity of focusing on how money is spent on schools.

28. JJP’s response to Hanushek is wrong. Hanushek 15 — Eric A. Hanushek, Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, Chairman of the Executive Board of the Texas Schools Project and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Texas at Dallas, Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, former Commissioner of the Equity and Excellence Commission at the U.S. Department of Education, former Professor of Economics and Political Science at the University of Rochester, holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2015 (“Not in the Right Ballpark,” Education Next, July 20th, Available Online at http://educationnext.org/not-right-ballpark/, Accessed 07-04-2017)My critique of the paper by Jackson, Johnson, and Persico is very simple and might be lost in the dazzling misdirection of their response. When I learned computer programming, I was taught to use simplified approximations of results to make sure that my more complicated, and harder to check, programs produced answers that were in the right ballpark. This step apparently is no longer taught.Jackson, Johnson, and Persico claim that a 22.7 percent spending increase is large enough to eliminate the average outcome difference in school attainment between the poor and non-poor. This is their estimate of the causal effect of added spending. Between 1970 and 2010 we saw real spending increases per pupil of roughly 150 percent, or over six times what they claim is necessary to

close the average attainment gap between poor children (those in

families below two times the poverty level) and nonpoor children (those in families above

two times the poverty level). Applying their estimates of the causal effect of added spending to the actual increases in spending suggests that the average poor-nonpoor gap in school attainment should have been more than closed – which is not even close to what we observe. A large and frustratingly-resilient average attainment gap continues to exist between children in poor and nonpoor families.Separating wheat from chaff is difficult, so a few added remarks are useful.• Nobody suggests that one should use the time series pattern of spending increases to estimate the causal effect of spending. The approximation in my critique was introduced only to see if their answer could be in the right ballpark. It does not look to be.• There is also no suggestion in my critique that there would not continue to be a distribution of outcomes within poor and nonpoor groups. If the average poor and nonpoor students got something close to a 150 percent increase in spending, the Jackson, Johnson, and Persico results imply that the gap in average attainment by poverty status should have been more than closed and indeed reversed. This estimate of the effect on average differences says nothing about whether there is a remaining distribution of attainment, which one would guess that there would be.• My calculations are not an extrapolation beyond the bounds of their data, because they pertain to the data Jackson, Johnson, and Persico

use in obtaining their causal estimates.

• Nobody disagrees that over time the U.S. student population has changed. There are more children in single-parent families, more children in families where English is not the first language, and more children in families below the poverty level – all factors that might lead to a more difficult to educate student population. But there are also more educated parents and smaller families over time – factors that might lead to an easier to educate population. No analysis has accurately netted out these influences. But, back to their causal estimates: one would have to believe that the net changes in families fully absorb the six-fold spending increase above their mean-equalizing level in order to reconcile actual spending increases with the clear lack of any dramatic outcome improvements. If the “quality” of our children has really deteriorated so much, we as a nation are in much more trouble than most people believe.• The investigation of “mechanisms” by Jackson, Johnson, and Persico does not show that reducing pupil-teacher ratios or increasing teacher salaries is causally related to better outcomes. They show that court-induced funding tends to go more toward these crudely-measured inputs than non-court-induced spending – but they do not show that these factors actually led to the outcome improvements that they identify. Indeed these findings on mechanisms also fail a simple sniff test: Between 1970 and 2008, pupil-teacher ratios for the nation fell by over thirty percent. Indeed this is the biggest driver of the increase in spending over that period, and spending unrelated to court orders followed this policy very closely – but outcomes did not.• When proclaiming the importance of their causal estimates of the impact of school spending, there are no qualifications: “Our findings provide compelling evidence that money does matter, and that additional school resources can meaningfully improve long-run outcomes for students.” But, when interpreting their results for policy, they are much more circumspect: “Spending increases should be coupled with systems that help ensure spending is allocated toward the most productive uses” – a conclusion that is unrelated to their causal analysis but that reflects exactly the conclusion to which most people have come.The central issue remains: How do we ensure that added funds to schools are used in ways that improve student outcomes? Jackson, Johnson, and Persico and I completely agree that just providing money is not sufficient for getting good results. The time series evidence shows that the existing incentives in

schools have not produced consistently better results to go along with dramatically increased funding , even if some funds have been used effectively. We apparently disagree on the other half – the necessity of spending,

but I fail to see how their analysis or other available evidence shows that more money is a necessary condition for improvement. It may or may not be necessary, but arriving at any conclusion on this depends on specific policies. We need to see the results of a set of policies that consistently improves achievement in order to assess whether (and how much) more funding is really necessary.

29. Baker is wrong — credible academics don’t take him seriously. Mehlhorn 15 — Dmitri Mehlhorn, Senior Fellow at the Institute for Education Policy at Johns Hopkins University, Senior Fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, holds a J.D. from Yale Law School and an M.P.P. in Education Policy from Harvard University, 2015 (“You Can’t Spin School Funding,” Dropout Nation—an online education journal, November 5th, Available Online at http://dropoutnation.net/2015/11/05/you-cant-spin-school-funding/, Accessed 07-04-2017)The conclusions of Professor Bruce Baker: Even more than Jackson and his team., Ben relies heavily on articles published by Bruce Baker of Rutgers University’s Graduate

School of Education. This reliance is common among reform skeptics, as Baker reaches the most anti-reform conclusions to be found within mainstream academia. Particularly cited by Ben is Baker’s 2012 editorial published by the Albert Shanker

Institute in which he writes that “by the early 2000s, the cloud of uncertainty conjured by Hanushek in 1986 had largely lifted in the aftermath of the various, more rigorous studies that followed.” Baker justifies this claim largely by citing Northwestern

University’s Larry Hedges, who re-reviewed Hanushek’s studies “quality control measures.” Reading Baker’s paper by itself, it is understandable why Ben finds a clear academic consensus that money matters.

The problem is that Baker omits so much that his conclusion borders on outright mendacity . For instance, Baker chooses not to mention that Hanushek wrote several peer-reviewed rebuttals to Hedges’ work. One of Hanushek’s responses could have been written with Ben in mind: “Hedges, Laine, and Greenwald commit the larger error of asking the wrong question. This problem tends to get lost in their statistical manipulations and their zeal to overturn prevailing conclusions about the effectiveness of pure resource policies in promoting student achievement.”A later paper from Hanushek goes into great detail about how Hedges and company “misinterpret the implications of their analysis [and,] through a series of analytical choices, systematically bias their results toward the conclusions they are seeking.” While Hanushek’s rebuttal is devastating, the more important point is that Baker simply pretends it does not exist – he paints a story of academic consensus that is entirely false .In assessing Baker, it is worth noting that serious education researchers tend to not even mention Baker. Jackson and his team , for instance, write an entire paper that “money matters”, and don’t once mention

Baker’s 2012 editorial. Rather, they refer to studies from 1995 and 1996

(which Baker ignores) that school spending doesn’t lead to better results.

The reason Baker gets so little play in serious education academia is because he writes editorials, not studies . His analyses are designed to achieve his intended results, and he does this by making subjective and one -sided decisions about what to include and what to ignore . [This is a point Dropout Nation Editor RiShawn

Biddle hit upon four years ago.] This is expected for expert witnesses at trials, but it is

disturbing for someone who pretends to be an academic , and is not transparent that he gets paid for reports by parties with a direct financial stake in his outcomes.

This problem was underscored in a 2011 tape-recorded conversation in which Baker said he would play with data , manipulate the questions he asked, and “pull things in and out” of his models “to tell the most compelling story” in exchange for a substantial research grant. This telephone conversation, including Baker’s own partially exculpatory comments, appears in full at about the 3-minute mark of this video clip. [Baker offers a rather lengthy explanation and defense of what happened.]None of this automatically invalidates Baker’s conclusions, but most of his research suffers the same kinds of glaring deficiencies I just mentioned regarding his 2012 Shanker Institute paper. Some day,

someone may decide to write a point-by-point review of Baker’s editorials, but for now the main point is to take his sweeping anti-reform conclusions with a heaping of salt .

30. Hanushek is a legend. Baker is obnoxious. Biddle 11 — RiShawn Biddle, Editor and Founder of Dropout Nation—an online publication about education reform, Director of Communications at the National Indian Education Association, 2011 (“When Being A Poor Man’s Diane Ravitch Isn’t Good Enough,” Dropout Nation, July 11th, Available Online at http://dropoutnation.net/2011/07/28/problems-poor-mans-diane-ravitch/, Accessed 07-04-2017)One of the sad consequences of Diane Ravitch’s laughable attempt to become the

Camille Paglia of education is that other university-based education researchers of the traditionalist mode want to do the same. After all, why toil anonymously writing tomes that will never be read — or trying to make

the education research field less-incestuous and more-rigorous in methodology — when you can make a small name for yourself supposedly debunking the school reform movement? The latter is probably a lot more fun.

One such person is Bruce Baker of Rutgers University, who has devoted so much of his career attempting to prove that spending more money on education leads to better results — including serving as an occasional witness for the equity and adequacy lawsuit crowd who have long sustained this theory. But in the past couple of years, Baker has managed to become one of those poor man’s Diane Ravitch es, offering comfort to a legion of education traditionalists desperately looking for anyone to buttress their failed vision of American public education . And he’s

gotten real good at engaging in name-calling when it comes to

Bryan Hassel, Marguerite Roza, Eric Hanushek and other leading research lights in the school reform movement . (He also called your editor, with whom he has tangled on occasion, a hack, failing to realize that among reporters and editorialists, that term is more-often a badge of pride than insult.) To Baker’s lament, save for

the occasional Education Next column, his targets generally ignore him . This should be no surprise. Ravitch is occasionally capable of coming up with something

interesting (if not necessarily empirically-driven); Baker, on the other hand, couldn’t muster up provocative if it jumped on his desk , danced a jig, and kissed him on the nose.So your editor wasn’t entirely shocked when Baker decided last week to ignore the entire substance of Dropout Nation‘s piece on the possibility of school reformers and Parent Power activists using the same legal tactics employed by the school funding crowd to advance school choice. Instead, he focused on the opening statement that there was no evidence that increased spending led to better student achievement.Since I had more-important matters to which I must attend, didn’t notice the piece until it showed up on my incoming links log, and figured that Baker’s screed would be no more scintillating than his last attempt, I didn’t bother to immediately respond till now. Let’s say this: He disappoints on the name-calling (it was nothing new), and once again proved that he didn’t understand the difference between a media outlet (which Dropout Nation is) and a research publication. But then Baker attempted to cite research defending his ultimate point: That more money spent on education leads to higher levels of student achievement. And what he offers is, well, not all that compelling.

The first example he cites is a report written by Joydeep Roy, formerly of

the Economic Policy Institute. Those of us who have covered the debate over graduation rates are

quite familiar with Roy’s work , or lack thereof, on the subject and simply

laugh when hearing it. His 2006 report, cowritten with EPI’s boss Larry Mishel, attempted to use federal education sampling data to weakly prove that graduation rates had not only not been in decline, but were actually been increasing, and that school reformers were wrong in their assertions. Not only was Roy’s argument disproved by Nobel Laureate James Heckman in his own research on the issue, but it had long ago been demolished by the work of then-Urban Institute scholar Christopher Swanson (now with the research division of the firm that publishes Education Week), former Manhattan Institute scribe Jay P. Greene (now at the George W. Bush Center) and his protege, Marcus Winters, Schott

Foundation’s Michael Holzman and Johns Hopkins’ Robert Balfanz, who used actual enrollment data to prove the point. Since then, neither EPI nor its most-prominent sponsor, the National Education Association, have made much hay about it.As for Roy’s school finance study? If one doesn’t consider the political effects of other school reforms — most-notably, the moves Michigan made towards holding schools accountable for performance beginning with the passage of Public Act 25 in 1990, which brought accountability to the state’s traditional public school systems for the first time — then Roy’s hypothesis and evidence that Michigan’s overhaul of school funding and increased subsidies for districts serving mostly-poor students could be convincing. But Roy fails to measure the possible impacts of accountability on student achievement, something that he is capable of doing even within the time-period

limitations of the study. As a result, the report is a very nice white paper that makes a case for forcing states to finally behave responsibly and bear the full burden of funding schools, something for which Dropout Nation advocates. But it is not convincing evidence that increasing school funding leads to higher levels of student achievement.One would think Baker could have found a better stalking horse for his debunking. In fact, the other studies he cites could have, in theory, been better for this purpose (although, one study, from MassINC, hardly offers the substantial evidence Baker claims, largely because it doesn’t account for efforts in

bolstering accountability). Even his own handiwork would have probably sufficed. But the fact that he didn’t isn’t exactly shocking.For one, Baker, like Ravitch, tends to engage in cherry-picking , citing the studies that best-favor his position and give no credence to those studies which offer a different narrative. Nothing wrong with that, to a certain extent, if you are a think tanker, a policy or grassroots advocate, or even an editorialist; after all, all three are primarily engaged in articulating solutions for issues and offering a worldview through which to frame them. But even then, they will admit there is another side to an argument and offer some level of nuance. But in the case of Baker, who is supposed to be engaged in university-based education research — an area in which solutions and opinion are supposed to be secondary to the goal of shining light on topics within education, and thus, supposed to be purer than thou — it means that he has moved away from being a researcher to being an advocate and pundit. Baker has essentially given up the role of being a pure researcher to being the very think tanker and advocate he generally despises. While Ravitch can pull such a trick off with ease largely because no one has ever considered her an empirical researcher in the first place, Baker is trying to play on both sides of the proverbial street and failing miserably.Second, the reality is that research on school funding offers a far mixed view on the efficacy of spending more money than Baker is willing to admit. Even if one goes along with Baker and dismisses the legendary Hanushek’s famed meta-analysis of

the issue, the research — including Harold Wenglinsky’s 1997 study on the use of school funding

— articulates a different position: That isn’t so much the level of funding that matters. It is how the money is spent. And as Charlene Tow notes in her 2006 study of California’s school funding system, it can also depend on the source of the funding itself. This isn’t to say that higher spending in efforts that are focused on student achievement won’t yield positive effects, but that just increasing spending in and of itself won’t work , especially if the districts receiving the funds are fiscally profligate.All are points school reformers have been articulating in a convincing manner for the past three decades, whether Baker likes it or not. And in a time in which cash-strapped states are dealing with $137 billion in budget deficits for the next two fiscal years and must address $1.4 trillion in pension deficits and unfunded retired teacher healthcare costs, simply focusing on increasing funding won’t work. And with so much money tied up by ineffective practices such as degree- and seniority-based compensation (including $8 billion a year dedicated to additional pay for teachers earning master’s degrees), it will take the systemic reform of K-12 in order to make school spending more effective in improving student achievement.But Baker’s piece does hit on one of the biggest problems in education — and one of the reasons why debates over school reform can end up being so circular: Education research, including from those working in universities, is hardly an exemplar of any form of quality.Let’s be clear: Education research at all levels is getting better and more- rigorous — and this is thanks to the data-driven efforts pioneered by Hanushek and William Sanders and advanced with the help of think tanks (to the annoyance of university researchers). But, as Forbes noted a decade in its report on the controversy surrounding the Success for All reading program, the education research field is often so incestuous that a supposed peer reviewer can also have a business relationship with the researcher presenting the data (and not recuse themselves in light of the conflict). The interpretations by researchers can also be so agenda-driven that even if underlying data is solid, it becomes sullied by association. So peer review in education research is not as exacting as it is in more-rigorous social- and hard science fields. And as a result, criticisms of think tank research by university-based counterparts, especially

from wanna-be Ravitches, end up seem ing rather specious .

31. Test scores disprove “funding key” — money is wasted on a staffing surge. Robinson and Scafidi 16 — Gerard Robinson, Resident Fellow in Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, former Commissioner of Education for the State of Florida, former Secretary of Education for the Commonwealth of Virginia, holds an M.Ed. from Harvard University, and Benjamin Scafidi, Professor of Economics, Finance, and Quantitative Analysis and Director of the Education Economics Center at Kennesaw State University, Senior Fellow at the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, former Chair of Georgia’s Charter Schools Commission, Director of Education Policy for the Georgia GOAL Scholarship Program, holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Virginia, 2016 (“More Money, Same Problems,” U.S. News & World Report, September 20th, Available Online at https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-09-20/more-money-wont-fix-failing-public-schools, Accessed 07-06-2017)Schools need extra money to help struggling students, or so goes the long-standing thinking of traditional education reformers who believe a lack of resources – teachers, counselors, social workers, technology, books, school supplies – is the problem. We agree that, at some level, resources matter to education. That said, a look back at the progress we've made under reformers' traditional response to fixing low-performing schools – simply showering them with more money – makes it clear that this approach has been a costly failure.

Since World War II, inflation-adjusted spending per student in

American public schools has increased by 663 percent . Where did all of that money go? One place it went was to hire more personnel. Between 1950 and 2009, American public schools experienced a 96 percent increase in student population . During that time, public schools increased their staff by 386 percent – four times the increase in students . The number of teachers increased by 252 percent, over 2.5 times the increase in students. The number of administrators and other staff increased by over seven times the increase in students.One could argue that those extra staff were needed to educate students with special needs, who were excluded by most public schools prior to 1970. Or maybe these extra staff were utilized to provide equal opportunity to African-American students who had been traditionally discriminated against during the Jim Crow era.This staffing surge still exists today. From 1992 to 2014 – the most

recent year of available data – American public schools saw a 19 percent increase in their student population and a staffing increase of 36 percent.

This decades-long staffing surge in American public schools has been tremendously expensive for taxpayers, yet it has not led to significant changes in student achievement . For example, public school national math scores have been flat (and national reading scores declined slightly ) for 17-year-olds since 1992.

In addition, public high school graduation rates experienced a long and slow decline between 1970 and 2000 . Today, graduation rates are slightly above where they were in 1970.

We think it is time to reform our thinking about public schools. One avenue we should consider is the important role of parents. According to a 2005 meta-analysis by William H. Jeynes, students living with involved parents had an academic advantage of higher grades and test scores than those living with less-involved parents. And according to Strong Families, Strong Schools,

studies of families show that the family's influence on a student is more important to his or her success than family income or level of education.Currently two states – Georgia and Massachusetts – are looking at ways to fix public schools beyond more bucks and bureaucracy.Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal is pushing a constitutional amendment that would allow the state to take control of persistently failing public schools. Voters in November will decide whether to transfer control of and funding for these schools to a state entity – the Opportunity School District – that will either manage failing public schools directly or convert them to charter public schools governed by a local board of parents and other citizens. The amendment is likely to pass, despite fierce opposition from the public school establishment.Massachusetts has one of the oldest charter school laws in the nation and is home to the highest-performing charter schools today. Low-income students in Boston charter schools generate learning growth equivalent to 31 days in math and 59 days in reading. With results like these, we might expect people to cheer. But this is not the case. Several groups, including the teachers' union, oppose the state's Charter School Expansion Initiative, a November ballot initiative, arguing that charters "create separate and unequal conditions for success by failing to serve as many high-need students as their host districts."It is long past time to try something new to improve American

schools. To give all students an opportunity to succeed, public education needs innovative approaches for the delivery of teaching and learning – be it through the options up for a vote in Georgia and

Massachusetts, or by empowering parents with more choices in public schools. Money, while

important, cannot solve our nation's public school challenges alone : It will take new and creative approaches that involve parents and communities, too.