Can money buy a good education?–Part I
by Rachel Hicks on February 22, 2008 in Blog, The Blackboard
Due to the complexity of this issue, I’m splitting this post into two parts. Check back for the continuation.
Like every first-year teacher, I had grand visions for what my seventh-grade classroom would look like–an inviting, text-rich environment that would enable great student achievement in the language arts. Knowing such a classroom would cost money, I spoke to a teacher at my new school before I arrived about my classroom funds. I was worried that an under-resourced school with a high-poverty student population wouldn’t be able to help me stock my classroom. My colleague was re-assuring: he told me that every teacher received $600 the previous year.
Maybe this won’t be so bad, I thought.
As it turned out, the $600 was just a fluke. The Mississippi legislature had actually fully funded education the previous year, an extremely rare occurrence since the passage of the Mississippi Adequate Education Program, the state’s equity in education financing law.
Since education hadn’t gotten fully funded my first year teaching, I was to get much less. How much less? $93.
This tiny budget might have been passable had my school had a supply room or the classroom I moved into had some usable materials. But the classroom I was assigned had belonged to a 30-year veteran who left me her 30 years of totally useless junk. The teacher’s desk was broken, as were most of the student desks. Even the chalkboards were totally unusable. Have you ever seen a green chalkboard? How about one with tiny bubble-lumps caused by heat and age? I couldn’t write on it without the chalk breaking.
We did have new textbooks, but they weren’t aligned at all to our whole-school reform program, and they were often too challenging for my students who were 2-3 years behind grade-level. As for novels, we had 16 copies of War and Peace, 32 copies of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and a smattering of other classics way above the reading level of the average seventh-grader (The Brothers Karamazov, anyone?).
Let me tell you what $93 will buy that could possibly be useful in these circumstances: a Greyhound bus ticket out of Dodge.
Let me tell you what $93 will not buy:
- a classroom set (25) of age-appropriate novels,
- composition books for all of my students (~90),
- a 20′x5′ dry-erase board,
- a year’s worth of necessary office supplies (printer paper, dry-erase markers, overhead markers, pens, pencils, a pencil sharpener, folders for student work [3 per student + 1 hanging folder], crates for organizing composition books/folders, ink for my printer, bulletin board supplies, and on and on), or
- specialty items like books on tape (for non-readers), a cork board, educational videos related to lessons, etc.
My favorite kick-in-the-pants was the fact that the school could barely afford copiers, so they gave the teachers a yearly budget of 800 copies each…and they made us supply the paper.
I could go on and on about this topic all day, but to make a long story short, even my best economizing skills honed from four years of living on a shoe-string work-study budget couldn’t make my dollars stretch enough to buy everything I needed. I felt like I wasn’t as effective as I could have been had I had the right resources.
I am not the only teacher who ever made frequent trips to Office Depot to spend money out of her own pocket. Sob stories aside, would more classroom dollars have translated into higher student achievement?
It depends on whom you ask.
School funding has long been a bread-and-butter issue for the Democrats. The few times education issues have gotten press this presidential election cycle, it’s been because the Democratic candidates have harped on the “unfunded mandate” that is No Child Left Behind. Schools, the Dems say, can’t improve without adequate resources.
On the opposite side of the aisle, Republicans retort that giving additional funds to education would just be “throwing money at the problem” because school expenditures have skyrocketed in the last thirty years while achievement has not.
As a policymaker, I’m much less interested in anecdotal evidence (even mine) and more interested in the data.
Do extra funds promote higher student achievement, according to the data? Well…maybe.
Eric Hanushek, an economist at the University of Rochester, has spent much of his professional career trying to answer this question. In a 1989 report summarizing the results of much of the literature on this topic, he concluded that there is “no strong or systematic relationship” between school resources (by resources, researchers mean the things that money buys, including teachers, classroom supplies, and school-wide improvements like computer labs and playgrounds) and other student outcomes including, but not limited to, student achievement.[1] To the consternation of education advocates and the delight of those who don’t want to put more money into education, his subsequent research has all come to the same conclusion.
Hanushek’s research isn’t unimpeachable, though. Rob Greenwald, Larry V. Hedges, and Richard D. Laine have twice taken on Hanushek.[2] They point out flaws in Hanushek’s research that make his conclusions circumspect. The major reason is that Hanushek’s methods are not accepted by those in the field of “meta-analysis” (the study of everyone else’s studies).
Here’s what Hanushek does: he collects all the research he can find on school resources and student outcomes and tallies how many show a positive, negative, or neutral relationship. The problems?
- Hanushek includes every single published (and unpublished) study’s results, even if the results have been published multiple times or if the studies all use the same data sets. If you think about it, that means that some results are being counted many times, which throws the total count off.
- Hanushek also doesn’t discriminate between studies that are scientifically sound and those that are junk.
- Lastly, Hanushek includes studies that measure things other than student achievement.
When Greenwald and company did their own meta-analyses, they concluded that the research finds a positive and statistically significant (real, not by chance) relationship between school resources and achievement. Of course, their studies aren’t without problems either, but no study ever is. To be fair, here’s some of the criticism from a 1996 Hanushek article [3]:
- Their requirement that a study be published in a refereed (peer-reviewed) journal would inflate the number of studies with positive findings, due to a bias in the education research community.
- Their six criteria together exclude up to 83% of the data available on this topic.
In my humble opinion, although the two Greenwald meta-analyses aren’t perfect, they are much less suspect than Hanushek’s work. Unfortunately, what does finding that school resources are positively tied to student achievement really tell us about how to improve public education? Surely, Greenwald et al. wouldn’t advocate that we just pump large amounts of cash into every school. How much is enough, and what should our extra dollars be buying?
To that question, we turn next week. Until then, check out Time magazine’s report on teachers, a resource more school funding may buy.
[1]Hanushek, E.A. 1989. “The Impact of Differential Expenditures on School Performance.” Educational Researcher 18(4): 45-65.
[2]Greenwald, R., L.V. Hedges, and R.D. Laine. 1994. “When Reinventing the Wheel is Not Necessary: A Case Study in the Use of Meta-Analysis in Education Finance.” Journal of Education Finance 20(1): 1-20. and Greenwald, R. Hedges. L, & Laine. R. (1996) The Effect of School Resources on Student Achievement. Review of Educational Research, 66, 361-396.
[3] Hanushek, E.A. (1996). A more complete picture of school resource policies. Review of Educational Research, 66, 397-409.
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