Does More Money Buy Better Public Education (1)

 Does More Money Buy Better Public Education

For many years, jvonkorff on education has maintained a dialog with people who care about producing better public education for the student cohorts who are currently being left behind in Minnesota.  Some of these folks are experienced educators.  But many of them derive their beliefs from the newspapers, from pundits and commentators, from business interests and various other interest groups.   Many of them adhere to the belief that more money makes no difference, makes no impact, in providing a better education for students of color, lower income students, for students with dyslexia or English language learners.  Some people adhere to this view as a matter of faith, in the same way that anti-vaxers doubt the benefits of vaccines, or climate deniers adhere to the belief that climate change is not caused by human activity.  Others base their belief on the suspicion that Minnesota is very generous with public schools, and so surely the cause of Minnesota's flagging public school results for those students must be something entirely different.   

A fair number of these people adhere as well to an unproven, but strongly held belief that they actually know the "real reason" for Minnesota's achievement gap failures.  Some simply don't believe in the kids themselves.   The fact that a select group of schools, charters and some publics, demonstrate far better success, they attribute to some selectivity factor, in which the successful schools attract better students than the others.  Others believe that a public school system can't work by its very nature, because they are government schools, and government is incapable of delivering anything well, they believe.  This ideological belief hardly explains the achievement gap, because the gap itself measures the success of public schools for some, but not all, demograpic groups of students.

A Question of Framing:  "Can Money Improve" Educational Results versus "Does Money Improve" Educational Results? 

Social scientist and economists in this age of statistics and data tend to approach these big questions by "running the numbers."  When you run the numbers, you don't necessarily have to know anything about how things work.  For example, one could roughly determine whether the weight of an object makes a difference in  how fast it falls without knowing a thing about physics.  One could even derive the formula for its behavior that way.  And so, we have examples of numerous social scientists trying to compare student outcomes as correlated to the amount of revenue per student supplied to various school districts.  Or one could conduct longitudinal studies comparing the educational results in a given school district, or a particular state, revenue per student is added or subtracted, or as teacher salaries, or other specific inputs are changed.  And despite the fact that correlation is not causation, some of these social scientists are ready to use that data to prove that money does, nor does not, make a difference.

There are some very good econometric studies that run the numbers but attempt to be more analytical and more careful about drawing conclusions. To get ahead of our story,  A recent one is Bruce Baker's How Money Matters for Schools.  That study concludes that:

resource investments matter for student outcomes, especially when they are directed to under-resourced districts and students from low-income families. The research also shows that spending resources in ways that reduce class sizes for young children and those with greater academic needs and that improve teacher quality have strong payoffs for outcomes. Finally, some research suggests that increasing and equalizing school funding may be most effective when it is part of a comprehensive set of efforts to improve teaching and learning.

 But I want to focus this first post on the very important difference between asking whether increasing revenue for public schools will improve educational results, or whether under the right conditions it will improve educational results, and indeed whether it is necessary. 

Debunking the Claim that there is No Connection between Money and Results

It is relatively easy to debunk the "no nothing" surface allegation that there is no connection at all between revenues and educational results.    Let's use the challenge of dylexia as an example.   About 15% of all students, or more, have the learning disability called dyslexia.   Minnesota's public schools have a dreadful record, by and large, with these students, and the reason is well known.  These students need a different approach to reading, to the decoding of the written language, than Minnesota currently offers in most districts.

Numerous parents across the state --- and across the country -- who have figured that out, hire Orton Gillingham trained tutors, and at their own expense, these parents are reporting outstanding, school career saving results.   The money that they spend, the extra tutoring time, transforms their students.   The cost of providing these services in a public school setting is well known to be substantial, and probably no less than providing it in a private setting.   I wouldn't care to advise the parents who are paying hard earned money to buy dyslexia tutoring are wasting their money because more money can't improve educational results.  Of course it can!  

Let's do a thought experiment to examine the connection between revenue and educational quality. 

Suppose, then, that the state figured out how much it would cost to provide students who have the characteristics of dyslexia with the same desperately needed dyslexia service that parents are now paying for out of their own pocket.  Suppose that it were $2000 per eligible dyslexia student for an average of four years of additional services.  Suppose that the State decided that Minneapolis had, say, 1000 non special education students who needed dyslexia service in four elementary grades, and suppose that the State increased Minneapolis's total revenues by $2 million dollars in order to enable Minneapolis to provide those services. 

We can ask a few questions:  If the state added to $2,000,000 to Minneapolis in recognition of the dyslexia education needs, would it automatically follow that Minneapolis would begin to meet the needs of student with dyslexia?  How would the State actually go about figuring out what it really costs to deliver quality dyslexia education.  What would happen if Minneapolis went through a bad budget year, or was forced to inflict major cuts to settle labor contracts?   Suppose the legislature added the $2,000,000 to Minneapolis's formula and then in the following year the legislature slashed that allowance in half to balance the budget?   Would Minneapolis be able to allocate staff, or hire capable staff, able to deliver an effective program of dyslexia education to elementary students, and how would the district coordinate that program with administrators, the existing reading program, and with the districts supervision, staff development and teaching and learning program.

Suppose that the state allocated $2,000,000 to Minneapolis and the resulting reading program was no different from the current program?  Would that prove that money can't improve educational results; would it prove that money doesn't improve educational results, or would it prove that there is something terribly wrong with the way in which Minnesota's public education system is structured, and that if we want money to make a difference, Minnesota must do something more than add money to the system?