I wonder what it looks like if you use some version of PPP dollars rather than nominal ones. Probably not all that different, though it might explain New York's high expenditure, for instance. In the city, some, at least, of that money is going towards higher real estate prices (schools need quite a lot of land) and compensating teachers for the higher cost of living, neither of which you would expect to convert into better teaching.
IIRC, if you measure salary relative to the state/district/territory mean, then DC has the lowest teacher's salaries in the US. This is because DC has so many well-paid people, not because their teachers are paid badly.
My bigger thought, though, is how much is more spending "pushing on a string". That is, there is an upper bound in school performance set by spending, but increasing spending does not push a school system that is not close to the upper bound forward at all, because that system doesn't know what it's doing when spending the money it has.
I am curious how much the "what" could be the culprit here: anecdotally, my mother (who teaches in a wealthy district) and my roommates (who teach in a very poor district) spend approximately the same amount of money on school supplies each year, but what they buy varies a lot. My mom buys "fun" items: stickers, fidgets, different kinds of furniture so kids have options as to how they want to sit/stand, games, science experiment kits, etc. My roommates buy basic supplies their kids can't afford: pencils, notebooks, folders, etc. In poorer districts, is a lot of money being spent just to get kids to the same place their richer peers are? Does stuff like free lunches/breakfasts get accounted for? I'd imagine those are expensive programs. Throw in school districts chasing fads like iPads or anti-racism (my roommate's poor district spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on DEI training), and you can easily get lots of variation in what is spent. Doesn't help you figure out what specifically is useful to spend on, as you noted, but it does seem to me like the most interesting variable.
I'm curious if the research has delved into potentially "invisible" money like how much parents and teachers spend out of pocket? If District A is spending $500,000 a year on tutoring and the _parents_ of District B are spending $500,000 on tutoring, District A might look like it's spending a lot more even though the spending per community is similar.
Arnold Kling writes about the null hypothesis in education - that most interventions fail. This seems to include increased spending. You had a post a while back about all the things that don’t work, that schools and education largely don’t work. What does? Surely there are studies that show something somewhere works some of the time, right?
Let’s say you’re walking into a brand new semester teaching future teachers. What do you tell them? What’s going to help them do a good job educating future generations?
I'm a novice to all this. I live in Philadelphia, don't have kids and don't plan to, but of course I hear all the time about the dismal quality of our public schools. I've always thought (probably due to it being conventional wisdom or something) that if we simply brought spending up to parity with wealthier school districts we would have much better outcomes, and despite PA as a *state* funding being higher than other states, we have a large gap in funding between rich and poor schools (https://www.inquirer.com/philly/news/local/20150314_Pa__s_school-spending_gap_widest_in_nation.html and https://www.inquirer.com/philly/news/local/20150314_Pa__s_school-spending_gap_widest_in_nation.html). I'm just wondering if I'm interpreting this incorrectly - it'd be news to me to know that we spend more money on poorer schools.
"Personally, I’m affronted by the fact that there are American schools that, thanks to faddishness and the influence of profiteering, have state-of-the-art computer classrooms but rotting walls full of asbestos. (This school district spent more than a billion dollars on iPads.)"
Even wealthy school districts fall prey to this temptation somewhat.
My parents bought a house they couldn't really afford to get their kids a perch in a prestigious school district that includes a superzip within its boundaries. We kids were ill-served enough by the district that we were well into adulthood before we realized that, however poorly the district's actual education may have fit us, the prestige of the district had probably served us well for college anyhow.
During one college break I found out two things about the district high school: The east wing had been renovated to become some sort of extremely tech-happy "science zone", while the west wing ceiling was leaking, and there was no plan to repair it. Why? Because state money was available for the tech renovation, but local money would have to pay for the roof repair. This, in a district where property taxes are themselves through the roof, allegedly to pay for such great education. If any district could afford to pay for its own roof repair, it was this one, and yet it hadn't.
I believe they eventually fixed the roof. At least, the west wing never collapsed. Science education at the high school didn't need tech to be excellent. It already was, as long as the admins gave the science teachers enough free rein.
“The key assumption is that the exact timing of events is as good as random.” (Lafortune et al) Hah. My advisor would have drawn a big X on that.
There are so many “quasi” experiments in education. I wish some of these zillions of dollars had been spent on true experiments with actual random assignment. I know it’s hard to convince policymakers to allocate money in this way, but we’d know a lot more.
If education policy doesn’t impact outcomes, the difference must be what happens outside of school. Economic security, less trauma, parents helping with homework (having the time and skills). Selection, because parents with good jobs and resources GTFO of “bad” school districts. (All of my overeducated friends left the city for the suburbs when their kids turned 5.)
I thought the linked post from 2017 (where small-group tutoring has the biggest impact) was interesting. Perhaps this is the best way to compensate for lack of parental involvement. The other interventions with bigger effects (feedback and progress monitoring; small-group instruction) also seem to point to individual attention. I can imagine this having a greater impact than small class size, which still leaves a teacher with about 20 students.
"despite decades of data from armies of researchers, no one really knows what kind of spending actually is strategic"
Surely no one seriously suggests that if we put more spending into armies of administrative bureaucrats, instead of the classrooms, we will get better results . . . ? Yet anecdotal evidence from discussions with current and former teachers suggests to me this is exactly where the increased spending is going (and of course, to jobs for the boys, which explains all those iPads).
1. Regardless of the underlying cause there is a consistent and statistically significant disparity in IQ scores between different races. If you think that IQ naturally correlates with test scores/grades then it would be expected to see a disparity there as well.
2. "Culture" may be difficult to quantify but is it unreasonable to believe that models such as tiger parenting have an impact? In S. Korea or Japan it's not unusual for students to head off to cram school after regular schools hours for a further five or six hours worth of study before calling it a day.
The work of Jonathan Kozol over the years has framed the public sphere of educational funding starting with his __Death at an Early Age: The Destruction of the Hearts and Minds of Negro Children in the Boston Public Schools__ (1967). He is still active: https://www.jonathankozol.com/about
Pretty much off-topic, but I wonder what Freddie makes of this remark from Richard Hanania, which was kind of thrown off in a recent article of his:
"As of 2018, China had the highest reading, math, and science scores in the world, while the U.S. was in 13th place.[Endnote 34] Chinese scores only came from the four major cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang, so they are not representative of the country. Nonetheless, in 2015, the Chinese score in mathematics was higher than that of Massachusetts, which has been shown by domestic assessments to be the top performing American state, while science scores were about equal.[Endnote 35] The four Chinese cities represented in PISA have a total population of 180 million, compared to fewer than 7 million for Massachusetts, implying that the numbers from that state may represent more of an elite fraction of the national population than the Chinese sample. As one analyst put it, the math difference between Shanghai and Massachusetts in 2012 was similar to that between Massachusetts and Mexico.[Endnote 36]"
It’s almost as if academic ability is innate and can not be meaningfully improved.
I wonder what it looks like if you use some version of PPP dollars rather than nominal ones. Probably not all that different, though it might explain New York's high expenditure, for instance. In the city, some, at least, of that money is going towards higher real estate prices (schools need quite a lot of land) and compensating teachers for the higher cost of living, neither of which you would expect to convert into better teaching.
IIRC, if you measure salary relative to the state/district/territory mean, then DC has the lowest teacher's salaries in the US. This is because DC has so many well-paid people, not because their teachers are paid badly.
My bigger thought, though, is how much is more spending "pushing on a string". That is, there is an upper bound in school performance set by spending, but increasing spending does not push a school system that is not close to the upper bound forward at all, because that system doesn't know what it's doing when spending the money it has.
I am curious how much the "what" could be the culprit here: anecdotally, my mother (who teaches in a wealthy district) and my roommates (who teach in a very poor district) spend approximately the same amount of money on school supplies each year, but what they buy varies a lot. My mom buys "fun" items: stickers, fidgets, different kinds of furniture so kids have options as to how they want to sit/stand, games, science experiment kits, etc. My roommates buy basic supplies their kids can't afford: pencils, notebooks, folders, etc. In poorer districts, is a lot of money being spent just to get kids to the same place their richer peers are? Does stuff like free lunches/breakfasts get accounted for? I'd imagine those are expensive programs. Throw in school districts chasing fads like iPads or anti-racism (my roommate's poor district spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on DEI training), and you can easily get lots of variation in what is spent. Doesn't help you figure out what specifically is useful to spend on, as you noted, but it does seem to me like the most interesting variable.
I'm curious if the research has delved into potentially "invisible" money like how much parents and teachers spend out of pocket? If District A is spending $500,000 a year on tutoring and the _parents_ of District B are spending $500,000 on tutoring, District A might look like it's spending a lot more even though the spending per community is similar.
Arnold Kling writes about the null hypothesis in education - that most interventions fail. This seems to include increased spending. You had a post a while back about all the things that don’t work, that schools and education largely don’t work. What does? Surely there are studies that show something somewhere works some of the time, right?
Let’s say you’re walking into a brand new semester teaching future teachers. What do you tell them? What’s going to help them do a good job educating future generations?
I'm sure that a prerequisite for spending money in the most strategically impactful way is to shovel it to consultants.
Does that initial chart include higher education spending, or is it K-12 only?
I'm a novice to all this. I live in Philadelphia, don't have kids and don't plan to, but of course I hear all the time about the dismal quality of our public schools. I've always thought (probably due to it being conventional wisdom or something) that if we simply brought spending up to parity with wealthier school districts we would have much better outcomes, and despite PA as a *state* funding being higher than other states, we have a large gap in funding between rich and poor schools (https://www.inquirer.com/philly/news/local/20150314_Pa__s_school-spending_gap_widest_in_nation.html and https://www.inquirer.com/philly/news/local/20150314_Pa__s_school-spending_gap_widest_in_nation.html). I'm just wondering if I'm interpreting this incorrectly - it'd be news to me to know that we spend more money on poorer schools.
"Personally, I’m affronted by the fact that there are American schools that, thanks to faddishness and the influence of profiteering, have state-of-the-art computer classrooms but rotting walls full of asbestos. (This school district spent more than a billion dollars on iPads.)"
Even wealthy school districts fall prey to this temptation somewhat.
My parents bought a house they couldn't really afford to get their kids a perch in a prestigious school district that includes a superzip within its boundaries. We kids were ill-served enough by the district that we were well into adulthood before we realized that, however poorly the district's actual education may have fit us, the prestige of the district had probably served us well for college anyhow.
During one college break I found out two things about the district high school: The east wing had been renovated to become some sort of extremely tech-happy "science zone", while the west wing ceiling was leaking, and there was no plan to repair it. Why? Because state money was available for the tech renovation, but local money would have to pay for the roof repair. This, in a district where property taxes are themselves through the roof, allegedly to pay for such great education. If any district could afford to pay for its own roof repair, it was this one, and yet it hadn't.
I believe they eventually fixed the roof. At least, the west wing never collapsed. Science education at the high school didn't need tech to be excellent. It already was, as long as the admins gave the science teachers enough free rein.
“The key assumption is that the exact timing of events is as good as random.” (Lafortune et al) Hah. My advisor would have drawn a big X on that.
There are so many “quasi” experiments in education. I wish some of these zillions of dollars had been spent on true experiments with actual random assignment. I know it’s hard to convince policymakers to allocate money in this way, but we’d know a lot more.
If education policy doesn’t impact outcomes, the difference must be what happens outside of school. Economic security, less trauma, parents helping with homework (having the time and skills). Selection, because parents with good jobs and resources GTFO of “bad” school districts. (All of my overeducated friends left the city for the suburbs when their kids turned 5.)
I thought the linked post from 2017 (where small-group tutoring has the biggest impact) was interesting. Perhaps this is the best way to compensate for lack of parental involvement. The other interventions with bigger effects (feedback and progress monitoring; small-group instruction) also seem to point to individual attention. I can imagine this having a greater impact than small class size, which still leaves a teacher with about 20 students.
"despite decades of data from armies of researchers, no one really knows what kind of spending actually is strategic"
Surely no one seriously suggests that if we put more spending into armies of administrative bureaucrats, instead of the classrooms, we will get better results . . . ? Yet anecdotal evidence from discussions with current and former teachers suggests to me this is exactly where the increased spending is going (and of course, to jobs for the boys, which explains all those iPads).
1. Regardless of the underlying cause there is a consistent and statistically significant disparity in IQ scores between different races. If you think that IQ naturally correlates with test scores/grades then it would be expected to see a disparity there as well.
2. "Culture" may be difficult to quantify but is it unreasonable to believe that models such as tiger parenting have an impact? In S. Korea or Japan it's not unusual for students to head off to cram school after regular schools hours for a further five or six hours worth of study before calling it a day.
I'm going to ly out how iterative video (telescopic video) will take down the EDU system, later today.
But suffice to say right now, before this happens, TEACHER FEAR OF BEING FIRED BY PARENTS, NOT STUDENTS = better educational outcomes.
And by being fired I mean, no union to save them.
Freddie, if I was trying to cancel you (I’m not), I’d say both your article and your responses below are “dog whistles” to “race realism” arguments.
Just to clear this up, your actual point seems to be that genetics *might* play a part in this gap, but clearly they can’t be the ONLY factor. Right?
Aren’t even Douglas Murray’s calculations about genetic differences among “races” much smaller than the real world outcome differences?
The work of Jonathan Kozol over the years has framed the public sphere of educational funding starting with his __Death at an Early Age: The Destruction of the Hearts and Minds of Negro Children in the Boston Public Schools__ (1967). He is still active: https://www.jonathankozol.com/about
Pretty much off-topic, but I wonder what Freddie makes of this remark from Richard Hanania, which was kind of thrown off in a recent article of his:
"As of 2018, China had the highest reading, math, and science scores in the world, while the U.S. was in 13th place.[Endnote 34] Chinese scores only came from the four major cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang, so they are not representative of the country. Nonetheless, in 2015, the Chinese score in mathematics was higher than that of Massachusetts, which has been shown by domestic assessments to be the top performing American state, while science scores were about equal.[Endnote 35] The four Chinese cities represented in PISA have a total population of 180 million, compared to fewer than 7 million for Massachusetts, implying that the numbers from that state may represent more of an elite fraction of the national population than the Chinese sample. As one analyst put it, the math difference between Shanghai and Massachusetts in 2012 was similar to that between Massachusetts and Mexico.[Endnote 36]"
For the full piece, see here: https://www.defensepriorities.org/explainers/the-inevitable-rise-of-china