Eric A. Hanushek: The economist of public schooling
Note: Last week, Gadfly profiled the recipient of the 2004 Fordham Prize for Valor, Howard L. Fuller. Read that profile at http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=132#1644.
University of Rochester economics professor Eric Hanushek was "stunned." The year was 1981, two years prior to the publication of A Nation at Risk, the landmark Reagan-era indictment of America's schools. For days, Hanushek had been methodically sifting through more than 125 studies of school reform done since 1965 to prepare a summary of the data for an upcoming school-finance court case. But the results of the literature review by this lifelong Democrat weren't turning out as expected. Most of the evaluations showed no relationship at all between the amount of money schools spent per student or per teacher and levels of student achievement. And for every infrequent analysis that suggested spending could boost student performance, Hanushek soon stumbled on another study that indicated more resources could depress achievement, too.
Then there was the elephant in the room that education analysts had long downplayed: since 1960, spending on students had soared and the number of pupils in an average classroom had dropped sharply - yet test scores had declined.
Hanushek's stark conclusions ran contrary to almost every tenet of both the ed school establishment and the teacher unions. Not surprisingly, Hanushek, who had never courted controversy before, was soon treated as "a lonely kook." His heresy was to challenge what might be called the "'More' solution": more funding and more teachers, leading smaller classes, would enable poor children and minority youth to get the same educational opportunities as affluent kids. But in the debate that ensued over decades to come, a funny thing happened: Hanushek's unexpected, unwelcome findings were confirmed over and over again.
In more ways than one, Hanushek was an unlikely dissenter from the orthodoxy of the public school establishment. As a child growing up in the suburbs of Cleveland, he attended public schools from kindergarten through twelfth grade and developed a fondness for public education. A favored aunt was a teacher and principal in Cleveland's schools and, years later, Hanushek's own children would attend public schools from elementary school to graduation. Hanushek's father, the manager of a small manufacturing firm, never attended college himself, and both parents drilled into young "Rick" Hanushek a sense of the importance of schooling at a young age. His undergraduate years at the Air Force Academy reinforced his belief that serving the nation and grappling with problems of inequality were worthy causes. But it was not until Hanushek enrolled as a doctoral student in the MIT economics department that he first studied issues of educational inequality in a sustained way.
At the time Hanushek obtained his Ph.D., faculty and graduate students down the street at Harvard were busy reassessing James Coleman's epochal 1966 study of equal educational opportunity under the tutelage of Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Frederick Mosteller. Coleman's controversial conclusion was that home environment and student peer groups outweighed school "inputs" like facilities, curriculum, and personnel in determining student achievement. Hanushek refused to believe it. Through the aegis of his former economics instructor, John Kain, Hanushek enrolled in the Moynihan-Mosteller seminar, and soon co-authored a paper with Kain casting doubts on the methodological rigor and conclusions of the Coleman report. He devoted his 1968 Ph.D. thesis to the Coleman report and racial inequality in the schools. "What drew me into the debate was that it seemed inconceivable that schools didn't matter," says Hanushek. "And I thought - and still think - that the inequality of outcomes in the educational system and the black-white achievement gap was a disaster for the nation."
Hanushek has now reviewed some 400 studies of student performance and school resources and more than 275 analyses examining the impact of class size reduction on achievement. Under both headings, the vast majority of studies fail to find any link between resource levels and student performance. And in the small number of instances where a link is detectable, there is no strong or consistent pattern as to whether more resources help or hurt.
Meanwhile, the prima facie case against throwing money at school problems continues to grow. As Hanushek has demonstrated, real spending per student rose by more than 200 percent between 1960 and the 1990s, and the pupil-teacher ratio fell from about 26 students per teacher to 17, a drop of about a third. Yet achievement has at best improved marginally, mostly among minorities.
Hanushek's debunking of the "More" solution has been especially persuasive because he does not claim that schools are inconsequential or that nothing works. "I came to believe that James Coleman mostly got it right,'' he says. "The measured characteristics of schools, the usual suspects, don't count. But people misinterpreted that to mean that schools don't matter." Much to the frustration of his critics, who would prefer to dismiss him as a right-wing naysayer, Hanushek has argued throughout his career that there are huge differences in quality between teachers and between schools. His research, dating back to 1970, has consistently shown that good teachers have an oversized impact on pupil achievement.
In addition to his own groundbreaking research, Hanushek has had a major impact on the methodology of education analysis. If economics is the dismal science, education research might be said to be sometimes dismal but rarely scientific. Inevitably, education researchers must tease out numerous variables in their assessments of school reforms: Is family background, the age of the child, the quality of the teacher, the size of the class, the nature of the neighborhood, or some other factor at work? The mishmash-evaluations that regularly follow have been likened to a soggy waffle.
Unlike medical researchers, or even social policy analysts who assess welfare and housing policies, education analysts rarely employ random assignment experiments to test K-12 interventions. They have similarly looked askance at economists' efforts to evaluate the efficiency, effectiveness, and productivity of school reform efforts. When Hanushek began his 1981 review on school spending, economists who studied K-12 schooling essentially stuck to modeling the returns on human capital, calculating the financial payoff to workers for extra years of schooling. Almost single-handedly, Hanushek introduced the economists' study of production functions (i.e., how much will a measured change in inputs alter outcomes) into the world of education research.
In the two decades since a little-known economist at the University of Rochester first reported his unexpected findings about school spending, much has changed. Hanushek's work is now the touchstone for other researchers in his field - a Google search for "Eric Hanushek" pulls up more than 13,000 references. Hanushek himself has gone on to serve on four committees of the National Academy of Sciences, two of which he chaired, and an appointment at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in 2000. "In 1981, I was offering more of a hypothesis about the allocation of school resources and spending," Hanushek says. "Today, I think that hypothesis is pretty widely accepted as fact." Thanks to Hanushek's ingenuity, thoroughness, and tenacity, the one-time "lonely kook" of school reform now has plenty of company.
To read Eric A. Hanushek's full biographical sketch, go to http://www.edexcellence.net/template/page.cfm?id=274.