ABSTRACT
This book examines the relationship between school resources and academic achievement in the context of public policy and jurisprudence. The major policy debate is how to raise student achievement, while the major legal disputes involve education “adequacy” lawsuits. In both contexts, a central question is whether school resources produce educational progress and fix deficits.
These policy issues were underscored in 2023 by the losses shown by the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress, which was suspended for several years because of COVID-19. These losses revived a debate about academic achievement and school resources first raised in the 1966 report, Equality of Educational Opportunity, by a team of social scientists led by James Coleman. This was the first comprehensive national study to find little relationship between school resources and academic achievement.
Since the Coleman Report, there has been much progress in measuring education achievement and documenting education resources and methodologies for assessing relationships between resources and achievement. The authors have used these data and methods in education adequacy lawsuits and academic reports. This book reviews those lawsuits and studies with the objective of presenting an up-to-date assessment of how school resources impact academic achievement and achievement gaps.
