Does School Finance Reform Reduce the Race Gap in School Funding?

Abstract

This paper offers new evidence on the impacts of school finance reforms (SFRs) precipitated by school finance litigation, exploring the extent to which the impact of SFR differs by district racial composition. Using difference-in-differences and event study models with a series of district and year (or state-by-year) fixed effects, and a sixteen-year panel of over 10,000 school districts, my analyses exploit variation in funding across school districts, and timing of school finance court orders across states, to estimate the effect of SFR on the distribution of district funding by racial composition. Models include relevant control variables available in national data and results are robust to numerous alternative specifications, including estimating impacts on percent changes in resources (in addition to levels), restricting analyses to districts in SFR states, controlling for additional covariates available in only some years and some states, and adding controls for state-specific time trends. In addition, I estimate changes in New York State to assess whether and to what extent results are sensitive to additional controls for revenue-raising capacity and district costs. Results suggest that SFR can work to alleviate racial funding gaps, though impacts are moderate.

School Finance Reform and the Distribution of Student Achievement

“…Insofar as better facilities promote student learning, achievement effects would continue to grow until several years after the last project is complete, potentially decades after the initial policy change. We thus emphasize the phase-in coefficient from equation (2) as the primary measure of SFR effects on test scores. Figure 6 presents our event-study analysis of the slope of achievement with respect to district income.…”

“…district-level mean household income distribution). 2 Between 1990 and 2012, real per pupil revenues rose by roughly 30 percent in the highest income districts, and by over 50 percent in the lowest income districts. Thus, while low-income districts collected about 20 percent less than high-income districts in 1990, they have been in rough parity since around 2001.…”

Analysis of Government Roles in Funding Public Education Expenditure and Resource Appropriation to Optimise Education Sustainability in China

“…The pertinent argument on public education discourse is that students who enjoy public education do not pay for academic services? In responding to that, in the United States of America, education is visualized as one of the major sources of revenue for the government (Rothbart, 2020), which invariably cannot be fully funded by the government.…”

How to Reform Without Reforming: School District Racial Composition and Pennsylvania’s “Fair” Funding Formula

“…In other states, they were the result of legislative activity alone (Lafortune et al, 2018). Studies of these reforms have found that they narrowed racial funding gaps (Rothbart, 2020), improved graduation rates (Candelaria & Shores, 2019;Jackson et al, 2016), increased standardized test scores (Lafortune et al, 2018), and even positively impacted long-term outcomes such as future adult earnings (Jackson et al, 2016).…”

“…Increases in state education aid to school districts can help address these disparities. One recent study found that changes to state education funding systems precipitated by school finance litigation between 1996 and 2011 helped reduce racial disparities in funding (Rothbart, 2020). Several national studies have found that court-ordered school finance reforms have positively impacted a range of educational outcomes as well, including graduation rates (Candelaria & Shores, 2019;Jackson et al, 2016), standardized test scores (Lafortune et al, 2018), and future adult earnings (Jackson et al, 2016).…”