Correlation: More Money for Poor Kids’ Schools, Better Educational Outcomes

The informative and successful New York Times (our President-Elect inserts gratuitous adjectives in his figmentary statements, so why shouldn’t I include some bonus descriptors in my factual remarks?) reports two studies which show that spending more on public schools produces betters results.

First, a July 2016 National Bureau of Economic Research study looks at funding changes and NAEP scores since 1990 and finds that increasing funding for the poorest districts boosts student performance:

They found a consistent pattern: In the long run, over comparable time frames, states that send additional money to their lowest-income school districts see more academic improvement in those districts than states that don’t. The size of the effect was significant. The changes bought at least twice as much achievement per dollar as a well-known experimentthat decreased class sizes in the early grades [Kevin Carey and Elizabeth A. Harris, “It Turns Out Spending More Probably Does Improve Education,” New York Times, 2016.12.12].

A fall 2015 study published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics  found spending more per student associated with better educational outcomes for poor kids:

That study was conducted by C. Kirabo Jackson of Northwestern, Rucker C. Johnson from the University of California at Berkeley and Claudia Persico, then a graduate student at Northwestern and now an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin. They examined outcomes for about 15,000 people, born between 1955 and 1985, and found that for poor children, a 10 percent increase in per-pupil spending each year of elementary and secondary school was associated with wages that were nearly 10 percent higher, a drop in the incidence of adult poverty and roughly six additional months of schooling.

“The notion that spending doesn’t matter is just not true,” Mr. Jackson said. “We found that exposure to higher levels of public K-12 spending when you’re in school has a pretty large beneficial effect on the adult outcomes of kids, and that those effects are much more pronounced for children from low-income families” [Carey and Harris, 2016.12.12].

Notice that both of these studies avoid the easily Googlable confounding factor of wealth in education (rich kids have better math and reading skills, do better on standardized tests, go to college and finish college more often…) by comparing poor kids to poor kids. Both studies compare poor kids whose schools got more funding to poor kids whose schools did not get more funding, and—son of a gun!—more funding correlates with more learning.

Kids from wealthy families and neighborhoods have a growing advantage over low-income kids, which is why the last thing we want to do right now is let Trump’s and Heinemann’s rich friends take their money out of the public school system to build even higher gates around their private academies. We get a great return on our public dollars by investing in poor kids in public schools.