Does Additional Spending Help Urban Schools? An Evaluation Using Boundary Discontinuities

Abstract

This study exploits spatial anomalies in school funding policy in England to provide new evidence on the impact of resources on student achievement in urban areas. Anomalies arise because the funding allocated to Local Education Authorities (LEA) depends, through a funding formula, on the 'additional educational needs' of its population and prices in the district. However, the money each school receives from its LEA is not necessarily related to the school's own specific local conditions and constraints. This implies that neighbouring schools with similar intakes, operating in the same labour market, facing similar prices, but in different LEAs, can receive very different incomes. We find that these funding disparities give rise to sizeable differences in pupil attainment in national tests at the end of primary school, showing that school resources have an important role to play in improving educational attainment, especially for lower socio-economic groups. The design is geographical boundary discontinuity design which compares neighbouring schools, matched on a proxy for additional educational needs of its students (free school meal entitlement -FSM), in adjacent districts. The key identification requirement is one of conditional ignorability of the level ofThe editor in charge of this paper was M. Daniele Paserman.

Unexpected school reform: Academisation of primary schools in England

“…7 Prior to 2010, students were also assessed in science. 8 For more information about the operation of primary schools and local government prior to 2010, see Gibbons et al (2011). Academy schools were first introduced to English education in the early 2000s. In general, these academies were a small number of secondary schools that had been underperforming.…”

The Effect of School Spending on Student Achievement: Addressing Biases in Value-Added Models

“…Causal estimation approaches usually rely on exogenous variation in school expenditure over time or areas in quasi-experimental designs (e.g. Jenkins et al (2006), Steele et al (2007), Heinesen (2010), Machin et al (2010), Holmlund et al (2010), Gibbons et al (2012), Lavy (2012) and Haegeland et al (2012)). The main econometric issues with estimating such models are input omission and mismeasurement of test scores, which may bias the estimation of the effect of school expenditure on pupil outcomes, of the persistence of achievement between education stages as well as the estimation of other input effects.…”

The Effect of Additional Funds for Low‐Ability Pupils: A Non‐Parametric Bounds Analysis

“…() and Gibbons et al . () all find positive effects of an increase in school resources on pupils’ achievement, while Bénabou et al . () find no significant effect of additional school resources.…”

“…These studies obtain contradictory findings. Papke (2005), Holmlund et al (2010), Machin et al (2010) and Gibbons et al (2012) all find positive effects of an increase in school resources on pupils ' achievement, while B enabou et al (2009) find no significant effect of additional school resources. Leuven et al (2007) and Van der Klaauw (2008) even find negative point estimates, which are in some cases significantly different from zero.…”