ABSTRACT
At the beginning of the new millennium, answers to the long running debate about whether additional educational resources can and have improved educational outcomes are increasingly being settled by new literature reviews, new experimental evidence, and reinterpretation of the historical trends linking changing educational resources to achievement. The counterintuitive view that “money doesn’t matter” was supported primarily by one set of reviews of the nonexperimental literature, and by the apparent stability of historical achievement trends despite an apparent substantial infusion of educational resources. More recent evidence, however, from the experimental as well as the non-experimental literature and from historical trend data appears to be converging on the hypothesis that certain kinds of targeted expenditures can raise achievement, particularly for disadvantaged students, but additional resources above current levels may not matter much for more advantaged students.
