William J. Fowler Jr., ed., National Center for Education Statistics
July 2002
The National Center for Education Statistics holds an annual conference on school finance and has now gotten around to publishing a 142-page collection of papers from the 1999 and 2000 conferences. Better late than never, however, as these six papers merit a good skim. Only the most intrepid readers are likely to venture beyond the first few paragraphs of some of them, however, or to delve deeply into their many pages of formulas and methodological discussions.
In "Reform and Resource Allocation: National Trends and State Policies," Jane Hannaway, Shannon McKay, and Yasser Nakib look at whether the standards-and-accountability movement has increased the proportion of resources devoted to instruction. Surprisingly, they don't find much overall change, though the evidence from a few states, such as Kentucky and Texas, is more promising.
"Where Does New Money Go? Evidence from Litigation and a Lottery" by Thomas S. Dee. Tennessee and Massachusetts were ordered by courts to boost their education funding. Georgia did so by choice, and paid for it with a new lottery. Dee says that both litigation and lottery led to spending increases, but that the states had only mixed success in productively targeting their additional dollars.
"School Finance Litigation and Property Tax Revolts: How Undermining Local Control Turns Voters Away from Public Education" by William A. Fischel. To equalize funding between schools, many states have assumed effective control of school funding, taking it away from local districts. Fischel presents evidence that, when the people holding the purse strings are no longer the people who use the schools, schools are less likely to be well funded. Fischel is an economist, but this evidence-based call for local control of education financing is written for the layman.
"Using National Data to Assess Local School District Spending on Professional Development," by Kieran M. Killeen, David H. Monk, and Margaret L. Plecki. Teacher professional development has not been much studied. The authors of this paper report on their ongoing attempts to answer the deceptively slippery question of how much is actually being spent on workshops, in-service programs and suchlike.
"Evaluating School Performance: Are We Ready For Prime Time?" by Robert Bifulco and William Duncombe. The authors evaluate the most sophisticated econometric models for rating how efficiently schools turn inputs (e.g. money, parental support) into desired outputs (like academic development). While the techniques aren't yet ready for widespread use, they could someday be a useful tool in the belt of school accountability.
"Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools" by Helen F. Ladd and Janet S. Hansen. The authors look not only at how money is spent, but also at how resources can best be allocated to improve academic achievement.
Interested readers can download the full report (containing all 6 papers) at http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2002316.
