ABSTRACT
School expenditures and the resources it purchases—smaller class sizes, more experienced teachers, teachers with higher degrees—have relatively small effects after taking student background into account. Of the approximately 40 estimated effect sizes for these resources, all but 2 are less than or equal to .05. In contrast, two of the resources discussed in Chapter 13—high dosage tutoring and teachers’ value-added scores—have effects that are four or five times stronger than conventional resources.
NAEP math scores for New York eighth graders illustrate the complex relationship between spending and achievement. Between 2000 and 2011, per capita expenditures increased by 40 percent, while scores for Black students increased by only 5 percent. Between 2013 and 2022, expenditures increased by another 20 percent, while that of Black scorers fell by 5 percent. The Black–White gap increased by nearly 10 points despite dramatically increasing expenditures due, at least in part, to court decisions in adequacy cases.
These results illustrate the challenges of court interventions in school finance cases and the inability of some judicial settings to undertake objective analyses of complex social and economic data on the relationship between school resources and academic achievement.
