Still No Effect of Resources, Even in the New Gilded Age?

Abstract

n a nd sol bee JungThe Coleman Report argued that family background is a fundamental cause of educational outcomes, while demonstrating the weak predictive power of variation in expenditures and facilities. This paper investigates the effects of family background, expenditures, and the conditions of school facilities for the public high school class of 2004, first sampled in 2002 for the Education Longitudinal Study and then followed up in 2004, 2006, and 2012. The results demonstrate that expenditures and related school inputs have very weak associations not only with test scores in the sophomore and senior years of high school but also with high school graduation and subsequent college entry. Only for postsecondary educational attainment do we find any meaningful predictive power for expenditures, and here half of the association can be adjusted away by school-level differences in average family background. Altogether, expenditures and facilities have much smaller associations with secondary and postsecondary outcomes than many scholars and policy advocates assume. The overall conclusion of the Coleman Report-that family background is far and away the most important determinant of educational achievement and attainment-is as convincing today as it was fifty years ago.

Delayed Benefits: Effects of California School District Bond Elections on Achievement by Socioeconomic Status

“…Existing research provides contradictory evidence about the effects of education funding on student achievement (e.g., Jackson et al 2016; Morgan and Jung 2016). Possible explanations for these contradictory results include heterogeneous effects of funding by student characteristics and revenue source.…”

“…Scholars and policymakers have been debating the efficiency of education funding for student achievement since at least the Coleman et al’s (1966) report (Burtless 1996; Greenwald, Hedges, and Laine 1996; Hanushek 1989, 1996; for reviews, see Baker 2016; Biddle and Berliner 2002), including contemporary evidence that shows no relationship between funding and achievement (Morgan and Jung 2016). However, recent estimates of the effects of court-ordered school finance reforms find evidence that students (particularly in low-income districts) benefit from state funding increases for K–12 education (Candelaria and Shores 2017; Jackson, Johnson, and Persico 2016; Lafortune, Rothstein, and Schanzenbach 2016).…”

School and Teacher Effects

“…It is unknown whether the relative weakness of these relationships is genuine, or is instead attributable to the necessity of using district--average expenditure measures, rather than school---specific measures. Our interpretation is that the relative weakness of the relationships is genuine, since this is what one would expect based on extant research that demonstrates the weak predictive power of expenditures measures of all types (i.e., from EEO to more recent efforts, such as Morgan and Jung 2016). For the other two problems scales - focused explicitly on resources, facilities, and administrator supports - the associations with resources are comparable to those with the school means of SES and test scores.…”

“…Both measures are drawn from the Common Core of Data, and averaged across the four years during which each student was (or would have been) enrolled in their school. The second and fourth panels are cost---adjusted versions of these two expenditure measures, using the same area---cost---adjustment procedure detailed in Morgan and Jung (2016).…”

Schools at the Rural-Urban Boundary: Blurring the Divide?

“…School funding is generally allocated at the district level, as are decisions about instruction and staffing. While the relationship between expenditures and achievement is complicated and more money does not tend to lead directly to higher achievement, when resources are used appropriately, both scholars and parents expect them to lead to better schooling outcomes and more educational opportunity (Morgan and Jung 2016).…”