Spending more money on educating children in poor districts can dramatically change the trajectory of those children’s lives, according to a new working paper examining the effects of court orders that attempt to equalize funding for poor and wealthy school districts.
Boosting school funding 20 percent erased the graduation gap between rich and poor students
Libby Nelson is Vox’s policy editor, leading coverage of how government action and inaction shape American life. Libby has more than a decade of policy journalism experience, including at Inside Higher Ed and Politico. She joined Vox in 2014.
Additional money spent educating a child from a poor family made that child more likely to graduate high school, less likely to fall into poverty as an adult and more likely to complete an additional year of education, public policy researchers from Northwestern University and the University of California-Berkeley found.
On some measures, such as the high school graduation rate, the gains from a 20 percent boost in funding at all levels of education were enough to entirely erase the gap between poor students and students from wealthier families.
School funding has traditionally mostly come from local property taxes, which can lead to a wide gulf between poor and wealthy districts. Between 1971 and 2010, 28 state supreme courts have required states to change their school funding system to reduce those differences.
The researchers, C. Kirabo Jackson and Claudia Persico from Northwestern University and Rucker Johnson from the University of California at Berkeley, looked at the effects of these court-ordered changes. They compared students in school before the reforms were implemented to students who were in school when the reforms were passed and students who went to school after the reforms.
They used data from a sample of 15,000 children born between 1955 and 1985, part of a longitudinal data set that followed those children into adulthood and measured their income.
They found a 20 percent increase in per-pupil spending could make a big difference for students from poor families, although students from wealthier families were unaffected. When students were compared to students who attended school before the increase, the additional spending had virtually closed the high school graduation gap between poor students and their wealthier peers. High school graduation rates increased 23 percentage points for poor students, and those students attended school or college for another year on average.
Later in life, the poor students’ family incomes were on average about 50 percent higher than they would have been without the funding increase.
The effects held even when controlling for the impact of other social programs, the researchers wrote: “Many have questioned whether increased school spending can really help improve the educational and lifetime outcomes of children from disadvantaged backgrounds,” they write. “The results in this paper demonstrate that it can.” They suggest that smaller class sizes and fewer students per counselor and administrator could account for the effect.
But they caution that similar effects might not happen today, even as school funding cases continue to make their way through the courts. School funding was much lower overall during the period studied, and bigger dollar amounts might now be required to see a similar difference.
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