National Academies Press: OpenBook

Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools (1999)

Chapter: 6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way

« Previous: 5 Improving the Productivity of Schools
Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×

Part III
Strategies for Meeting the Goals

Education finance is only one part of a total system of education. Many of the concerns about the financing of education reflect large issues regarding the overall education system. Hence, proposals for changing the finance system can be presented in at least two ways: (1) as a menu of options for driving the education system in desirable directions or (2) as intertwined components necessary to achieve a given vision of overall education reform. Despite the conceptual appeal and logic of starting with a vision of overall reform and designing a finance system consistent with that vision, we structure the discussion of finance reform in line with the first approach; that is, as the options available for driving the education system in the directions embodied in our three goals: (1) promoting high achievement for all students in a cost-effective way, (2) reducing the nexus between family background and student achievement and, (3) raising revenue in a fair and efficient manner.

The reason for proceeding in this way is the absence of a single consensus vision of how the education system as a whole should be changed. Although many observers agree that the education system requires change, people disagree on the best way to change it. These disagreements have various and overlapping roots: people view school performance through different lenses; they hold different values, which influence their views of desirable methods of change; and they can reasonably draw different conclusions from patchy and conflicting empirical evidence about the effectiveness of specific reforms.

Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×

The following chapters examine the major policy options relevant to each goal. The options are arranged within the framework of the four generic strategies for altering finance systems introduced at the end of Chapter 2:

  • Reduce funding inequities and inadequacies.

  • Invest in capacity.

  • Change incentives to make performance count.

  • Empower schools or parents to make decisions about public funds.

Although we examine policy options separately by strategy, in many cases the strategies will be most effective if they are combined in a coherent way. In general, the case for combining strategies is most compelling when policy makers are trying to work within the existing system of school governance. Some proponents of major change in the governance system (e.g., through vouchers allowing parents to choose public or private schools) see little reason to combine finance strategies. To them, the introduction of more choice and competition among schools will provide whatever incentives are necessary to induce schools to make the types of investments needed to improve student learning.

The importance of making major changes in the governance system takes on special urgency in the context of goal 2, because many decades of attention to the educational problems facing at-risk children and urban schools in the framework of the existing educational system have so far resulted in improvements that are marginal at best. The seriatim discussion of individual policy options for goals 1 and 2 arranged by finance strategy may mask an important overall question, which we as a committee wish to highlight specifically, although we are not of one mind about how to answer it.

The question is whether it is more important to focus on finance changes that leave the structure of American education basically intact (as the first three strategies assume) or to explore options that would constitute a strong break with past practices (as policies emphasizing school and parent control over education dollars might do). Many reforms are occurring in schools and districts serving high proportions of at-risk students. It is still unclear, though, whether the current round of reforms will be more successful than previous ones. At the same time, how effective new structures would be is not yet knowable either, since many are largely untried. Thus policy makers face fundamental choices for which we cannot provide scientific solutions. These choices will rest on individual conclusions about the prospects for meaningful change within the current educational structure and on values in addition to those of enhancing fairness and productivity.

Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×

6
Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievement in a Cost-Efficient Way

Promoting higher achievement for all students in a cost-efficient way poses fundamental challenges for the education system and will require significant changes in education finance. Among the finance options to be explored in this chapter are placing greater emphasis on the concept of educational adequacy; investing in the capacity of the system, particularly through improved professional development of teachers; changing incentives for teachers and other key participants to focus more on student achievement through new salary structures and accountability systems; and significant restructuring to give more authority over spending to schools and to parents. No single strategy or policy option is a panacea, all involve trade-offs of various types, and some of the strategies or individual options are likely to be most effective if combined with other strategies or policy options. Instead of laying out a blueprint for specific change, our aim in this chapter is to provide policy makers with information that will allow them to weigh the benefits and costs of each policy option.

REDUCING FUNDING INEQUITIES AND INADEQUACIES

As applied in school finance court cases for the past 30 years, equity concerns typically apply to the distribution of funding across districts. Equity defined in this way—but extended to the patterns of funding across schools and across states—continues to be an important concern that we address further in connection with goal 3, raising revenues fairly and efficiently. However, a con-

Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×

tinued focus on this definition of equity is not likely to promote the goal of raising student achievement across the board.

More promising is the new legal focus on adequacy. Because the move from equity to adequacy shifts attention away from the distribution of funding levels across districts to the adequacy of funding for desired outcomes, the strategy of trying to ensure that school funding is adequate is potentially crucial to the goal of increasing achievement for all students. In the absence of adequate funding, it will be difficult for states, districts, or schools to generate high and ambitious levels of student achievement for all students.

Policy makers, however, face the vexing problem of determining how much money would be required for true adequacy. This difficulty arises in part because there is so little firm knowledge about how school spending or inputs translate into school outputs given the current nature of teaching and learning. We know even less about what would be required to reach more ambitious achievement standards or what would be required if education were delivered in a more efficient manner.

Will a push through the legal system to increase the adequacy of funding help to achieve the goal of higher achievement for all students? Given that the outcome is uncertain, the best we can do is to identify some of the issues that will affect it. One issue is whether the courts are likely to be more amenable to adequacy than to equity complaints. Notably, as discussed in Chapter 4, not every high court has been receptive to an adequacy argument. For example, high courts in Illinois, Rhode Island, and Florida all rejected adequacy-based claims on the grounds that it is the responsibility of the legislature, not the courts, to decide on the quality of education. Thus, the main uncertainty here is the willingness of the courts either to specify what educational adequacy entails or to require that state legislatures specify those desired outcomes. Without a relatively explicit statement of desired educational outcomes, the court will not be able to determine whether a state is providing adequate funding for education.

A second issue is how state legislatures are likely to respond to adequacy judgments from the courts. State politics played a large role in how states responded to court decisions related to financing equity. On the surface, an adequacy approach (with its focus on the level of outcomes) may be more broadly appealing than the redistributive remedies that typically emerge from cases based on equity considerations. Such an approach may be easier to sell to a public that wants more accountability from government (Carr and Fuhrman, 1999). In practice, however, adequacy, too, is likely to call for politically controversial redistributive remedies, in that additional funds are most likely to have to be directed to those districts with the lowest-performing students. Moreover, lack of knowledge about the educational production function—and disagreement about whether it even makes sense to talk about such a function—adds a huge element of ambiguity and uncertainty to the concept of adequate funding, one that could well provide a basis for legislative stalling and inaction.

Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×

As documented in Chapter 3, court cases (those focusing on equity or adequacy claims or both) appear to have raised school spending in the low-spending districts without at the same time lowering it in the high-spending districts (Evans et al., 1999). Evidence from a few of those states suggests as well, however, that the additional revenue received by the recipient jurisdictions has been devoted primarily to the same activities as schools undertook before and hence may not have done much to increase student achievement (Goertz and Natriello, 1999). This evidence provides support for the committee's view that changes in funding alone are not likely to be sufficient to increase student achievement.

Regardless of the success of adequacy as a legal strategy, it is the committee's view that adequacy of funding has a central role to play in any education reform strategy designed to increase student achievement. In particular, discussions of educational funding should include explicit considerations of what the public and policy makers want the educational system to accomplish and what kinds of educational opportunities must be provided to meet those objectives. However, the committee also concludes that the provision of adequate funding by itself will do little to foster significant improvements in overall student achievement. Thus, while improving the adequacy of funding may be a necessary part of any education reform effort—and is likely to be especially crucial for districts or schools serving disproportionate numbers of disadvantaged students—it is only part of an overall program for increasing student achievement in a cost-efficient way.

INVESTING IN CAPACITY

To many education reformers, especially those committed to standards-driven systemic reform, a central element of any finance reform program is investing in capacity. Such investments are necessary to ensure that the system can deliver the quality of product required to enable students to achieve to high levels. Thus, this strategy calls for strategic investments that will yield high rates of return in the form of student achievement. These might include investments in school inputs, such as the capacity of teachers, the quantity of teachers (to reduce class size), technology and school buildings, and investment in the capacity of students to learn, such as preschool programs and family support services. Developing the capacity of students to learn can be extremely important in some cases but, because the returns are likely to be greatest for students from disadvantaged backgrounds, we defer the discussion of that type of investment to the next chapter. In addition, we defer to that chapter investment strategies that focus (1) on reducing class size (because there is some evidence that the benefits of that strategy are greatest for low-performing students) and (2) on technology and facilities, because current policies for financing these investments appear to generate even greater inequities across districts than is the case for operational spending. In this chapter, we examine whether new approaches to paying for teachers

Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×

and teacher development could align investments in teacher capacity more closely to the goal of improving overall student achievement.

Overview of Issues Related to Teacher Capacity

The capacity of a teacher to be successful depends of a variety of factors, including his or her knowledge of the subject matter, of how students learn, and of methods for teaching. These types of knowledge are needed for a teacher to succeed in promoting student learning by, for example, selecting good teaching materials, making wise instructional decisions, and assessing student progress. Moving toward the goal of higher levels of achievement for all students will require two other types of teacher capacity as well. One is the ability and the skills to teach the kinds of knowledge and skills demanded by 21st century jobs and citizenship, and the other is the skills to teach highly diverse groups of students, with increasing proportions whose language and culture differ from their own, as well as increasing numbers of students with disabilities and other students with special educational needs. New developments in the science of learning, for example, are increasing awareness of how important it is for teachers to pay careful attention to the prior knowledge, as well as the skills, attitudes, and beliefs, that learners bring to school. Prior knowledge not only consists of the individual learning that students bring to the classroom but also knowledge that they acquire from their social roles, such as those connected with race, class, gender, and cultural and ethnic affiliations. Teachers must be helped to develop teaching practices that start from the structure of a child's prior learning and are sensitive to the cultural and language practices of students and the effect of those practices on classroom learning (National Research Council, 1999b).

The committee is persuaded by the evidence reviewed in Chapter 5, including recent work by Hanushek et al. (1998) using Texas data and Wright et al. (1997) using Tennessee data, that teacher quality matters for student achievement. At the same time, we note that research has not been able to systematically link teacher quality to traditional teacher measures, such as experience or holding a master's degree. These measures are of particular interest for finance, since they are the ones that are linked to teacher pay and hence affect the cost of providing education. Ferguson (1991) and Ferguson and Ladd (1996) show that a different measure—but still an imperfect one—of teacher quality, namely teacher test scores, does emerge as an important determinant of student achievement in both Texas and Alabama.

Other studies document the importance of teacher preparation. For example, Goldhaber and Brewer (1997) report positive effects on student math and science achievement of subject-specific training programs and, using a matched comparison design, Hawk et al. (1985) show similar results for mathematics achievement. Darling-Hammond's (1990) review of the literature provides support for the importance of teacher preparation and certification.

Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×

To summarize, there is little doubt that the quality of teachers matters. The challenge is to develop the best policies to enhance it. Perhaps the most frequently discussed policy change involves altering teacher education and induction practices, which in the first instance is not a finance option but has finance implications for teacher training institutions, would-be teachers, and school districts. Two other policy options, raising teacher salaries and expanding professional development, fit more closely with the concept of financial investments intended to build teacher capacity. We examine these three options, with more attention to the latter two, in the following sections.

The challenge of enhancing teacher quality must be addressed in context. One aspect of the context is the rising demand for new teachers. The Department of Education estimates that the nation's schools will need to hire about 2.2 million new teachers during the next decade, a figure that reflects both a continuation of the growth in student bodies that started in the mid-1980s and a growing number of teacher retirements (U.S. Department of Education, 1998a). The fear is that this rising demand will put pressure on schools to lower their standards and to hire unqualified individuals. Given that about one-half to two-thirds of the new teachers hired will be first-time teachers, the rising demand also implies that attention needs to be paid to the quality of the training new teachers receive and the quality of professional support as they start their careers. Failure to provide that support could exacerbate the current situation, in which 22 percent of new teachers leave the profession during the first three years (U.S. Department of Education, 1998a).

Another contextual aspect is the great variation across areas and in the quality and preparation of teachers and in the outlook for teacher shortages. For example, while 28 percent of high school mathematics teachers nationally lack as much as a minor degree in the subject, state levels range from a low of 9 percent for Missouri to over 45 percent for Alaska, Washington, and California (NCES data reported in Darling-Hammond, 1997: Appendix B, Table 3). Differences also emerge between central cities and other areas. For example, 21 percent of the public school teachers who teach science in grades 7-12 in central cities report no degree (major or minor) in their main teaching area, more than twice the 9 percent in other areas (Lewis et al., 1999: Table 5).

In a 1997 report prepared for the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, Darling-Hammond emphasized that shortages of well-prepared teachers are largely a problem of distribution rather than numbers. Demand for teachers is particularly great in the South and the West, and in port cities on both coasts, whereas slow-growing states have teacher surpluses. Wealthy districts with high salaries and desirable working conditions rarely experience shortages in any field, whereas districts and schools with large numbers of low-income and minority students are much more likely to face difficulty recruiting qualified teachers and to hire unqualified teachers or to use substitute teachers to fill positions (Darling-Hammond, 1997). A recent story in Education Week

Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×

provides further evidence that many regions have surplus teachers in some areas and shortages in others (Bradley, 1999).

Teacher Education Programs and Licensing Standards

Building teacher capacity by improving the education of new teachers responds to long-standing observations about the shortcomings of teacher education in the United States and to new standards in some disciplines, such as those developed by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, that clarify what teachers need to know and be able to do to promote all students' learning. The impetus to change licensing standards comes also from international comparisons—from U.S. students' poor showing on the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), coupled with evidence that other nations invest much more intensively in developing new teachers (Paine and Ma, 1993). Finally, it reflects concerns about the importance of assuring that the large number of new teachers who will be needed during the next decade are adequately prepared to teach.

Research is emerging that clarifies shortcomings in existing teacher education programs and provides guidelines for improvement (Darling-Hammond, 1997; National Research Council, 1999b). Standards for teacher training programs are now emerging. However, quality control is quite limited, research on teacher learning is still relatively new and limited, and teacher education programs vary widely in how well their graduates are prepared to teach. National strategies to promote improvements in the quality of teaching include standard-setting for teacher education programs, for teacher licensing, and for teaching excellence. These include national professional standards for teacher education programs developed by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), standards that are being developed by the Interstate New Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC), and national standards for advanced certification developed by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS). Such standard-setting initiatives are intended to provide frameworks within which state and local systems can develop quality controls that upgrade the preparation and support of teachers.

As a committee on education finance, we were not able to thoroughly evaluate a strategy for enhancing teacher quality through the use of stricter accreditation requirements and higher requirements for teacher certification. However, we have two comments to make about this strategy. First, despite its apparent logic, some observers have questioned parts of it, such as the desirability of having education programs accredited by NCATE. Ballou and Podgursky (1998, 1999) provide evidence showing that teachers emerging from accredited programs are no more qualified than teachers emerging from other programs. These two researchers are also concerned that requiring accreditation may eliminate programs that currently provide teachers to districts that serve disproportionate

Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×

numbers of disadvantaged students.1 Second, raising entry barriers to teaching (through, for example, extending the amount of time it takes to get certified or through limiting the number of ways that one may enter the teaching profession) could be undesirable to the extent that it disproportionately discourages the most able students—those who have the greatest alternative opportunities—from making the investment to enter the teaching profession.

Improving teacher preparation and developing professional standards for teachers are fully consistent with the goal of raising achievement for all students. Whether teacher quality will best be enhanced through teacher licensure exams, holding teaching colleges and universities more responsible for the preparation of the teachers they prepare, or other mechanisms is beyond the scope of this committee. We simply urge that policies aimed at improving teacher preparation and certification be evaluated at least in part for their impacts on overall student achievement.

Teacher Salaries

Several arguments are frequently offered for raising teacher salaries, including the fair treatment of existing teachers, the need to keep teacher salaries in line with the salaries of other college graduates so as to attract qualified people into the teaching profession, and as a way to increase teacher quality. Of most interest to us here is the extent to which raising teacher salaries across the board is a good way to raise the quality of teachers.

Before we turn to that issue, however, we briefly look at the trends in teacher salaries relative to those in other occupations. Table 6-1, using data based on the decennial censuses of population for the period 1940–1990 (reported in Hanushek and Rivkin, 1996), shows percentages of male college graduates earning less than the average male teacher and similar percentages for women. The lower the percentage, the less attractive is teaching as a profession. The table shows a decline in the attractiveness of teaching as a profession for men from 1940 to 1970, with a partial turnaround since then. For women, the drop is more precipitous and has no recent turnaround. As of 1990, only 36.5 percent of college-educated men were in jobs that paid less than that of the average male teacher, and 45.3 percent of college-educated women were in jobs that paid less than that of the average female teacher.

A refinement of the analysis that isolates the patterns for 20- to 29-year-olds indicates that the relative position of teacher salaries for young female teachers

1  

 Information from Pennsylvania underscores these concerns. In that state, the districts with the highest proportions of NCATE-certified teachers have the lowest proportions of students going on to post-secondary education (Strauss, 1998:152). Although this observation provides no information on causal links, it is consistent with the two concerns raised by Ballou and Podgursky and calls out for more investigation of the reasons for the observed pattern.

Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×

TABLE 6-1 Position of the Average Teacher in the Nonteacher Earning Distribution, 1940–1990

Year

Percentage of Male College Graduates Earning Less than the Average Male Teacher

Percentage of Female College Graduates Earning Less than the Average Female Teacher

1940

52.5

68.7

1950

36.2

55.0

1960

28.7

52.7

1970

25.7

47.1

1980

31.0

50.1

1990

36.5

45.3

 

SOURCE: Hanushek and Rivkin, 1996. Data obtained from the U.S. Decennial Census of Population, Public Use Microdata, 1940–90.

(the women who have the most lucrative opportunities outside teaching) is approaching that for men. On the basis of that convergence, Hanushek and Rivkin (1996:29) conclude that schools will not be able to count on a continual supply of high-quality female teachers in the future and that the rising opportunity costs for women will put upward pressure on school budgets given that women made up 68 percent of all teachers in 1990. Overall, these trends based on average salaries suggest that teaching is becoming less financially attractive for college graduates compared with other occupations. While the average salaries mask what has been happening to the structure of salaries, a more detailed analysis of salary trends by teacher experience or education level is not likely to change this basic conclusion.

But will higher salaries increase teacher quality? One reason they may not emerges from empirical observations from New York, Michigan, and other states that salary increases are often disproportionately directed toward the more experienced, senior teachers, an outcome that results from the contract bargaining between local teachers' unions and school district officials (Lankford and Wyckoff, 1997; Monk and Jacobson, 1985; Murnane et al., 1987). The backloading of salary increases onto veteran teachers means that salaries for entering teachers are kept relatively low. The low salaries for entering and inexperienced teachers may well interfere with the ability of the system to attract high-quality new teachers into the profession, and those how enter may well leave before they are eligible for the higher salaries available to more experienced teachers. Thus, the salary bargaining process in which veteran teachers exert a lot of power means that money devoted to increases in teacher salaries is not being used as effectively as it could be toward the goal of increasing the capacity and quality of teachers.

Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×

A 1997 book by Ballou and Podgursky using national data provides further support for the view that rises in teacher salaries may not increase teacher quality. In particular, they convincingly document that increases in salaries during the 1980s did not increase the quality of the new teachers attracted to the profession. They explain this finding in part by the possibility that, despite the higher salaries, highly qualified college students may have been discouraged from making the investment in teaching by the decline in openings for teachers that occurred as veteran teachers responded to the salary increase by staying in the profession longer. Thus implicitly these researchers draw attention to the importance of the structure of salary increases.

Two aspects of the Ballou and Podgursky study could limit its applicability to the potential efficacy of future increases in teacher salaries. First, it is a national study that abstracts from the tremendous variation across the country in the market conditions for teachers. Indeed, a recent study by Loeb and Page (1998), based on a state-level panel dataset, supports the view that teacher salaries can affect the quality of schooling and student outcomes. Using school dropout rates as their primary measure of student outcomes and hence of school quality, the authors conclude that, holding all else equal, raising teachers' salaries by 10 percent would reduce dropout rates by 3–6 percent. Their careful attention to the specification of their equations and in particular their focus on changes rather than on levels makes the analysis convincing and worthy of attention. Their rough calculations suggest that the cost of raising teacher salaries by 10 percent would slightly exceed the benefits as measured by the present value of the increases in individuals' future salaries associated with their higher educational attainment. However, the authors note that their measure of the benefits of an increase in teacher salaries probably underestimates the true benefits, since it is based on a single measure of student outcomes. They note further that if salary increases were better targeted, they are likely to be more cost-effective than the across-the-board increases they examined.

Second, the Ballou and Podgursky study applies to a period of declining enrollments and a general teacher surplus, a market context that the authors used to help explain their findings. In a market with excess supply, an across-the-board increase in teacher salaries provides an incentive for the existing stock of teachers to remain in the profession longer than they otherwise would, which in turn limits the number of new openings. Given the outlook for a tighter market for teachers in the future, and a very tight market in such fields as mathematics and science and in some areas of the country, salary increases could potentially be more successful in attracting higher-quality teachers in the future than they were in the 1980s. Nonetheless, this different market context does not negate the conclusion that when or if they are planning to raise teacher salaries, policy makers trying to increase the quality of teachers entering the profession will need to pay more attention to the structure of salaries and in particular to the level of entering salaries than has been the case in the past. In addition, they may want to

Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×

change the current salary structure in ways that would increase the incentives for existing teachers to become more productive, a topic discussed further in the section on strategies to change incentives.

Developing the Capacity of Practicing Teachers

National survey data show that the country is doing a poor job of improving the capacity of practicing teachers. While about half of all teachers had some professional development during 1993–94, only 15 percent spent nine or more hours in any area of professional development (Darling-Hammond, 1997:34–35, and Appendix B, Table 5). Traditionally, most professional development for teachers has consisted of brief district-sponsored workshops, which can be useful for training in specific skills but are of little value for learning subject matter in any depth or learning how to assess student learning in the context of teaching. These long-standing shortcomings are increasingly problematic, given the new roles for teachers suggested by findings from research on learning and in light of the fact that teachers will need more knowledge and radically different skills than they generally now have if education reform efforts are to succeed (National Research Council, 1999b).

While there is still a lot to learn about professional development, some types appear to be far superior to others. Bureaucratic forms of professional development fail to support teacher learning. By contrast, effective programs are characterized by teachers' active involvement in planning and doing professional development, sufficient time and support for making significant improvements in practice, and an on-site professional community as a context for teacher learning and for nurturing commitment to serving all students. (For field-based research on processes of teacher learning and teacher community see, for example, cases reported in Cohen et al., 1993; Lord, 1994; Schifter and Fosnot, 1993; Talbert and McLaughlin, 1994).

Research conducted in the context of state systemic reform adds to this knowledge base and to principles for effective professional development. A 10-year study of California mathematics education reform included a 1993 survey of teachers that allowed the researchers to test a variety of hypotheses about the links between, first, the type and form of professional development and changes in classroom practices and, second, those practices and student achievement (Cohen and Hill, 1998). The first set of linkages are more convincing than the second set, because the survey data had to be aggregated to the school level for the achievement part of the analysis and the survey sampled only four or fewer teachers at each school. The study shows that professional development works best—in the sense of changing teacher practices—when it is closely related to the new curriculum. Also, time spent on professional development matters for its success. Although this analysis was cross-sectional, and thus controlled for neither teachers' nor students' prior performance, the findings are consistent with

Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×

related research on student achievement in California and with the field-based research in the project. A study by Wiley and Yoon (1995) of student performance on the California mathematics assessment also found that teachers' extended opportunities to learn about the mathematics curriculum and instructions were associated with higher student achievement.

A survey by Kennedy (1998) of eight studies that examine the relationship between in-service training and student achievement provides additional insight about the types of in-service professional development programs that are likely to be most effective. The most effective programs, she concludes, are those that concentrate on teachers' knowledge of the subject, on the curriculum, and how students learn the subject. As she notes, the promise of this approach, combined with her conclusion that programs that focus on teacher behaviors are not effective in raising student achievement, suggests that more extensive research on content-based approaches would be desirable.

Further suggestive evidence that investment in teacher development can increase student achievement comes from cross-state comparisons. Darling-Hammond (1997:11–14) reports that states investing heavily in a teacher capacity-building strategy over the past decade–North Carolina, Connecticut, and Kentucky in particular–had outstanding 1990–96 gains in students' mathematics scores for grades 4 and 8 on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). North Carolina, for example, introduced a whole set of programs designed to increase teacher quality, including boosting minimum salaries, requiring schools of education to be accredited, investing in improvements in teacher education curriculum, launching a beginning teacher mentoring program, and introducing incentives for teachers to become board certified. Nevertheless, it is not possible to say definitively how much of the achievement gains should be attributed to investments in teacher capacity, since such investments generally did not occur in isolation. In North Carolina, for example, a whole set of strategies was introduced, including a sophisticated school-based accountability system (Grissmer and Flanagan, 1998).

The main lesson to emerge from the research on professional development is that there appear to be positive returns from some types of professional development but not from others. Noteworthy as well is that the professional development that appears to be most successful in the studies cited here is that embedded in a comprehensive program for educational improvement, such as standards-based systemic reform. Thus, general professional development would seem to be a much less productive investment than a professional development program that is closely tied to other components of an overall reform effort. Importantly, however, even the studies that show positive effects of professional development programs are limited, in that they do not compare the returns of professional development programs in the form of student achievement with the costs of such programs.

Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×
Final Reflections on Investment Policies to Develop Teacher Capacity

Not included in this set of policies aimed at developing teacher capacity is a potentially important one—the restructuring of teacher salaries to change the incentives for practicing teachers, which is included below in the section on altering incentives to make performance count. In one sense, the distinction we have made here between financial investments in capacity and altering incentives is a bit misleading. It is designed to distinguish policies that require significant resources (either new resources or resources transferred from other purposes), such as raising teacher salaries and investing in professional development, from those that use the financial system to change the incentives facing teachers. In fact, as should be clear from the discussion of the investment policies in this section, the distinction between capacity building and incentive programs is fuzzy and in many cases the strategies will be most effective if they are used together.

CHANGING INCENTIVES TO MAKE PERFORMANCE COUNT

The main policy options for changing incentives within the existing system include changing the incentives of teachers, primarily through changes in the structure of their salaries, and changing the incentives for schools, using school-based accountability and incentive programs.

Incentives for Teachers

Teachers are typically subject to a single salary schedule that gives higher pay to teachers with more experience and with advanced degrees, regardless of whether the advanced degree is related to what they teach. While such a structure could in principle generate salaries that vary approximately with the effectiveness of teachers, many researchers (e.g., Hanushek, 1986, 1997) have argued that the resulting pattern of salaries bears almost no relationship to the effectiveness of teachers and, consequently, that the current salary schedule provides few or no incentives for teachers to become more effective. This argument is bolstered by many empirical studies that find little or no systematic relationship between the experience or education of teachers and the performance of their students. While some researchers (e.g., Ferguson and Ladd, 1996) have found evidence that the relationship may be somewhat stronger than earlier studies suggest, none disputes the basic claim that the structure of the salary schedule provides little incentive for teachers to become more effective. This statement does not imply that teachers have no incentives to become more effective, only that the salary schedule itself does not provide those incentives.

Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×
Merit Pay and Career Ladders

Many school districts over the years have experimented with various programs of merit pay for effective teachers or career ladders that identify effective teachers and provide them with leadership opportunities in such areas as curriculum and professional development. For a variety of reasons, merit pay programs typically have not survived for very long and those that have survived seem to be in the wealthier districts and have evolved from a true merit pay plan, in which teachers are rewarded for better work, to ones in which teachers are rewarded for taking on more tasks (see Murnane and Cohen, 1986). Although career ladder programs have shown somewhat more positive results, states typically have not maintained funding for them in a consistent manner over time (Odden and Kelley, 1997:34).

Several concerns have been raised with regard to merit pay (see Educational Research Service, 1978; Hatry et al., 1994; Jacobson, 1987; Johnson, 1986; Murnane and Cohen, 1986). For a variety of reasons, teachers do not like them. In part, this reflects the difficulty that principals have had in developing appropriate criteria for measuring the effectiveness of teachers that correspond to professional standards of good practice. There is also a widely expressed concern that merit pay for individual teachers may lead to competitive behavior among teachers and other school personnel. Those who raise this concern see it as counter to the view that teachers should be working cooperatively to improve the learning environment within a school. Cohn (1996) notes that similar issues arise in other contexts and, in response to such concerns, incentive pay plans in business often include a group incentive component. Other concerns are that districts and states often fail to provide stable funding for such programs. That instability both weakens their incentives and sends a signal that they are not core elements of a state or district program.

A study by Hatry et al. (1994) of 18 merit pay and career ladder programs showed that most of the districts were unsuccessful in creating lasting and effective programs. Though there were some positive effects in some districts in the form of reduced teacher turnover and absenteeism, most of the programs suffered from low teacher morale, high costs, and administrative burdens. A study by the National Research Council (NRC) on the potential of merit pay for improving performance of federal government employees (National Research Council, 1991) found little direct evidence on which to answer this question conclusively and concluded that positive effects might be found but could be attenuated by some of the same factors that have caused concern in education. While individual merit pay may have as-yet untapped potential, the difficulties encountered by school districts that have tried it have led to a shift in emphasis among education policy makers and researchers to group, or school-based, incentives.

Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×
Linking Pay to Knowledge and Skills

As an alternative both to the single salary schedule and to merit pay or career ladder programs that provide pay or other benefits in return for performance, teacher salaries could be linked to the skills and knowledge that research suggests are needed for teachers to be effective. Odden and Kelley (1997) argue that this approach, which in the context of professionals is often referred to as competency pay, has been successful in the private sector and would be particularly appropriate for an education system focused on raising student achievement. The goal of such an approach is to ''provide incentives for teachers to develop their knowledge, skills, and competencies in new and more effective forms of pedagogy, deeper and more conceptual subject matter knowledge needed to teach consistently with the ways children learn advanced cognitive expertise, and the leadership and management skills needed to engage in effective school-site management and decision making" (Odden and Kelley, 1997:51).

A competency-based salary structure could be implemented in various ways. One possibility is to introduce into the existing system of teacher licensure and certification teacher bonuses that are tied to teacher knowledge and skills. An alternative is to restructure the whole system of licensure and tenure so that movement through the various steps is contingent on the teacher reaching higher levels of professional knowledge (see Odden, 1996:248). Such a structure would differ in significant ways both from the current approach to pay and from a merit pay system. It would differ from the current system in that advancement and pay would no longer be based on simple quantitative measures such as years of experience or advanced degrees. It would differ from merit pay programs in that the "best" teachers would no longer be singled out and rewarded with additional pay. Instead, a competency-based salary structure would reward teachers for developing skills that are identified as important, such skills being assessed relative to predetermined, clear-cut standards. Rather than creating competition among teachers, it signals the types of competencies the school or district wants its faculty to acquire (Odden and Kelley, 1997:81–82).

Restructuring salaries in this way is appealing because it would align salaries more closely with the goal of raising student achievement. However, a number of issues remain and would need to be studied. The key questions include: How can we ensure that the knowledge and skills are the ones that are highly correlated with how effectively teachers increase student learning? Would such a package of skills vary with the types of students that teachers are serving? How could one avoid the danger that such skill packages may become uniform and hence inappropriate for teachers in some schools? Is there a danger that teachers will simply get the additional training in order to increase their salary without transferring the new skills to the classroom? Is there any concrete evidence that such an approach would lead to more effective teaching in the classroom? As the elements of knowledge and skills salary structures are introduced, research should be mounted

Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×

to answer these questions. More widespread implementation should depend on what those answers are, even though the logic of the proposed change seems compelling.

Other Financial Incentives

Given the variation across parts of the country and across areas within states in the size and seriousness of teacher shortages, a variety of other financial incentives designed to facilitate the move from areas of teacher surplus to areas of teacher shortage are worth examining. Such incentives might include, for example, bonuses for new teachers and scholarships for teacher candidates in areas of shortage. Some states are currently experimenting with such programs. For example, Massachusetts recently offered $20,000 signing bonuses to outstanding teachers throughout the country and expects to process 600 applications for 50 positions (Bradley, 1999:10). More significant from a structural perspective is the desirability of states' reexamining their rules with respect to such issues as the portability of pensions and teacher licenses. Current limitations on portability and the transferability of licenses hinder the movement of teachers from suburban areas to urban areas as well as across states. Given that society as a whole has become increasingly mobile, eliminating some of these impediments to teacher mobility appears to have potential as a means of keeping good teachers in the profession and employing them in areas where they will be most productive.

Incentives for Schools

Many states are now experimenting with school-based accountability and incentive systems designed to focus the attention of schools on increasing student achievement. Such programs, for example, in North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, and Kentucky, are typically systems administered from the top-down, in that they operate within the traditional public school system and are typically imposed on schools from above. A fully developed system would start with a curriculum and clear content standards describing what the state or district wants children to know and be able to do. As part of that step, policy makers would need to develop a consensus on which subjects are most important and will be the focus of the accountability system. The next step is to locate or to develop assessment tools that generate reliable and valid measures of how well students have mastered the curriculum. Those measures of student performance would then serve as the basis for measuring how effectively schools increase the learning of their students. How best to measure the performance of schools is a thorny issue, and one to which we return below. The state or district would then provide a system of rewards and positive incentives for schools to increase student performance and would develop a set of sanctions or intervention strategies for low-performing schools. As is emphasized below, productive intervention strategies

Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×

for low-performing schools are a crucial component of a well-designed accountability system. In their absence, a school-based accountability system may become simply a system for assigning blame rather than a system for improving student performance.

Such systems are fully consistent with the goal of altering incentives to make performance count, given their focus on student outcomes rather than on the inputs that typically were the focus of state accountability systems in the past. A second characteristic is that they focus attention on the school as the improvement unit rather than on the school district, on the teachers, or on the students. The focus on the school is designed to encourage all school personnel to work cooperatively toward a common, well-specified goal. Provided schools are given more management authority than in the past, the schools then would be in a position to rearrange the use of resources toward the goal of higher achievement.

One possible disadvantage of the focus on schools as the unit of accountability is the free rider problem: bonuses are typically given to all teachers (and possibly support staff as well) in an effective school regardless of their contribution. A further, potentially more serious problem with the focus on schools is that good teachers in low-performing schools may prefer to leave such schools in favor of schools where their chances of earning a financial bonus are higher.

Use of Tests for High-Stakes Accountability

Central to all the school-based accountability and incentive systems is the measurement of student performance, as typically measured by test scores. In Chapter 4, we commented on the current status of assessment. We turn here to the uses of tests for high-stakes accountability.

Because student test scores are so highly correlated with student background characteristics, it is essential that school-based accountability systems focus on gains in, rather than levels of, student performance. Otherwise the indicators of success would measure the background of the students rather than the contribution of the schools to student learning. Thus, measuring a school's value-added is at the heart of any sophisticated accountability system. Koretz (1996), Meyer (1996), Clotfelter and Ladd (1996), and Ladd and Walsh (1998) describe the technical challenges involved in using assessments for educational accountability and in developing value-added indicators of school performance. In addition to the technical challenges are considerations related to costs. As Meyer and others note, value-added indicator systems may be costly if they involve frequent testing and comprehensive data systems containing information on student test scores and student, family, and community characteristics. In short, they may require a major commitment on the part of school districts and states. Potentially, however, computer-adaptive tests could provide the requisite data without suffering

Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×

from these shortcomings (Klein and Hamilton, 1999). The NRC Committee on Title I Testing and Assessment (National Research Council, 1999c) examined a variety of issues involved in using assessments for accountability, including the thorny question of how to determine how much improvement it is reasonable to expect schools to achieve in a given period and how such expectations can be determined.

High-stakes testing can have negative as well as positive effects on classroom practice. Teachers may focus on the content to be covered on the test to the exclusion of other relevant material or spend inordinate amounts of time administering worksheets and drilling students on basic facts in preparation for multiple-choice tests (Smith, 1991; Koretz, 1996; Linn and Herman, 1997). Teachers also may coach students on test items. Such coaching appears to explain why Kentucky, a leading state in using tests for school accountability and education reform, found that large score gains on its state assessment were not reflected in gains on NAEP or on college admission tests. Moreover, gains were far higher on items that had been administered the previous year (Hambleton et al., 1995; Koretz and Barron, 1998). Avoiding these negative effects requires that policy makers desiring to use test scores for high-stakes purposes be aware of such potential misuses and ensure that testing programs build in the necessary features to minimize distortions in both classroom practice and test results.

Another danger in high-stakes testing is that tests may be misused. Tests are created with specific uses in mind. Experts agree that the validity, reliability, and fairness of a test can only be assessed in the context of how the scores on that test are used. Policy makers, practitioners, and the press, however, are prone to use test scores to meet a variety of needs, many of which may not have been anticipated by test developers.

North Carolina, which developed tests specifically for its new school-based accountability program, provides an example. Faced with the pressure from that program, several school districts are now trying to shift the pressure for performance down to the student level. Some school districts, for example, are now requiring that students who do poorly on the state test go to summer school and, if they continue to fail the test, to be held back. The controversial issue here is whether the state test, which uses matrix sampling and was developed for the purpose of school-wide accountability, is valid for the purpose of individual accountability.

The NRC Committee on Appropriate Test Use concluded that existing mechanisms for enforcing appropriate test use (mainly professional norms and legal action through administrative enforcement or litigation) are inadequate and suggested consideration of possible new methods, practices, and safeguards (National Research Council, 1999a). The committee did not recommend a particular strategy or combination of strategies, but it noted that promoting proper test use will require multiple strategies.

Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×
Recognition, Rewards, and Sanctions

Rewards for effective schools can take the form of public recognition or cash bonus for effective schools or teachers and staffs within the schools. While views about the importance of the financial awards differ, two concerns about them arise. One is that if they are large, they may encourage teachers and others to go to inappropriate lengths to win awards, including, for example, outright cheating, examples of which have been found in both Kentucky and Dallas. Other less nefarious changes in behavior may ultimately have even greater consequences. For example, to the detriment of low-performing schools, the existence of financial bonuses provide good teachers at those schools new financial incentives to transfer to a school where they are more likely to win an award.

If financial rewards are part of the program, the experience from several states suggests that they be funded by a reliable funding source. If the funding is subject to an annual appropriation, teachers may be skeptical about whether it will continue to be available (see the example of Kentucky in Elmore et al., 1996). The history of funding of such programs in other states does not bode well for teachers' confidence that funds will be forthcoming in the future. For example, both Indiana and Texas included funding in their programs in the early 1990s but both have now eliminated funding for teacher bonuses.

Potentially even more significant than the positive recognition and financial awards for effective schools is how the state or district treats the poorly performing schools. Accountability programs typically include both intervention strategies and sanctions for such schools. The experience from the various states suggests that state policy makers have more work to do in determining the best approach for dealing with the low-performing schools that are identified by the accountability systems. Sanctions will work only to the extent that fear of being sanctioned forces schools to improve their performance before they are sanctioned. The application of sanctions after the fact is problematic in that it may hurt the students as much, or more than, the personnel being sanctioned. Technical and financial assistance may be able to improve school performance in some cases, but it is unlikely to be helpful in all.

Will Such Incentive Programs Increase Student Achievement?

There is no simple answer to this question, although three types of research shed some light on the issue. First is evidence from the experience with similar incentives from the private sector, which shows that programs should not be viewed as a substitute for good management, which includes ensuring that teachers have the capacity to perform their jobs and providing a positive work environment. In addition, empirical evidence from the private sector is neither solid enough to conclude that financial incentives generate large increases in produc-

Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×

tivity nor detailed enough to provide much guidance for the design of incentive programs in the education sector (Kohn, 1993; Nalbantian and Schotter, 1997).

A second source of evidence is studies of two specific accountability programs. To our knowledge, these are the only systematic studies of the effect of the programs on achievement. The first study examines the Dallas accountability program (Ladd, 1999), and the other examines the five-year experience of Charlotte, North Carolina, with its Benchmark Goals Program (Smith and Mickelson, forthcoming). The Dallas study examines the impact of that program on student performance on the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS), a test that is linked to the state's curriculum and that serves as the basis for the statewide accountability system but is only one of two tests used in the Dallas system. The study design involves comparing the paths of student outcomes in Dallas schools to those in five other big Texas cities during the period that included the year before the Dallas program was implemented (1991) and the following four years (1992–95). This study finds evidence of gains in student achievement for whites and Hispanics but not for black students. Other positive effects included greater declines in the dropout rates and greater gains in attendance rates in Dallas than in the other big Texas cities. The study of Charlotte's program is less encouraging, in that it finds few or no gains from the incentive system (Smith and Mickelson, forthcoming).

One possible explanation for this mixed evidence of gains in achievement is that neither the Dallas nor the Charlotte program was embedded in an overall program of education reform. The need to embed such accountability programs in larger overall reform programs that include, for example, the development of professional capacity emerges as an important lesson from the experience with such programs to date. Evidence for this conclusion comes from the work of researchers under the auspices of the Consortium on Policy Research in Education (CPRE) designed to examine various theories of teacher motivation (Heneman, 1997; Kelley, 1997). They found that teachers within a school were more motivated to exert effort when the school met a variety of enabling conditions, including having a curriculum aligned with the state assessments, adequate revenues, strong districts and principal leadership, and adequate professional development for all teachers in the school. Further suggestive evidence for this conclusion emerges from the rapid gains in North Carolina test scores that were mentioned earlier. The combination of that state's accountability system and professional development strategy appears to be having a positive impact on student achievement.

EMPOWERING SCHOOLS OR PARENTS OR BOTH TO MAKE DECISIONS ABOUT THE USE OF PUBLIC FUNDS

The fourth generic finance strategy is to give more power to schools to spend as they wish or to parents who can use it to pay for the school of choice for their

Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×

child. Thus, compared with traditional funding mechanisms, this strategy provides for a lot more choice and flexibility, both on the part of the schools and on the part of parents and their children. Such a strategy can be implemented through policies that alter the existing public school system in mostly incremental ways (for example, by giving public schools control over finance and other decisions) or through policies that effect major changes in the overall governance system (e.g., by permitting charter schools to operate outside the traditional regulatory system or giving vouchers to parents to use at either public or private schools). The more spending authority is given to the schools, the freer they are to make their own trade-offs between the quality and quantity of teachers, between the number of teachers and other staff, and between personnel and other inputs such as computers and library books. The best example of this approach in the United States is illustrated by the funding on charter schools. Once such schools are granted a charter, they are funded on the basis of the number of pupils they serve and are free to use those funds to achieve the purposes set forth in the charter. Because of the flexibility given to charter schools, the programs they offer inevitably would differ one from another in significant ways. For that and other reasons, the freedom for parents to choose whether to send their child to a particular school would be a logical component of this type of funding arrangement.

By giving existing schools more flexibility in the use of funds or encouraging the establishment of charter schools, policy makers hope to promote innovations that will improve the quality of education. The incentive to provide a high-quality education comes from the fact that, if schools do not do so, they will lose students and will lose the funding associated with those students. A variation of this approach, but one that is consistent with the concept of introducing more flexibility into the provision of education, is to have schools or school districts contract with the private sector to provide educational services. Supporters of more contracting hope to harness the profit motive of the private sector to make the provision of education more efficient. Significantly, the expansion of the charter school movement has increased interest in the use of private firms, either as firms hired by the developers of charter schools or, in the states where it is allowed, as the developers of new charter schools.

When funds are, in effect, given to parents, the parents have more say about which school their child attends. As noted in Chapter 5, funds can be given to parents in various ways, including tax credits for tuition or other educational expenses or in the form of vouchers for education that can be used in any school, whether it be public or private. Many arguments can and have been made for giving parents more choice over the schools their children attend. One of these is to encourage schools, both existing schools and new schools, to be more responsive to parental demands than they currently are, which would improve the quality of education to the extent that parents are looking for quality. Another is the view that when parents are free to choose the schools their children attend, each

Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×

school may become a more coherent community with a shared mission and shared set of values than is the case when children are assigned to schools. The hope is that this shared sense of community would make each school a more effective organization and hence able to provide higher-quality education. As Brandl (1998) notes, these two mechanisms of competition and community through which parental choice might improve schools need not be in conflict and would complement each other in a well-designed system.

Much has been written on these strategies for improving schools. In a book of this type, we obviously cannot do justice to all the literature. Our more limited intent in the following sections is to rely primarily on empirical studies to determine how likely it is that strategies of this type will increase student achievement or, alternatively, will generate any given level of achievement in a more cost efficient manner. We start with the school-oriented strategies of site-based management, charter schools, and contracting with private firms. We then turn to various policies that enhance parental choice.

Effects of School-Oriented Strategies on Student Achievement and Efficiency

Although we begin this section with school-based management (SBM), it is worth noting that most so-called SBM programs in the United States to date have included only limited financial autonomy. Hence, we have little direct U.S. evidence on the effects of giving schools more financial autonomy. Nonetheless, the findings from the literature are suggestive. Charter schools, in contrast, provide a better example of meaningful devolution of financial authority to the school level, but as the evidence on the effectiveness of charter schools is still quite limited and the jury is still out on their effectiveness in promoting high achievement and encouraging innovation. Moreover, limitations on capital funding for such schools have put them at a disadvantage. Finally, the limited experience with contracting between school districts and private firms provides more insight into the nature of contracting problems than it does about any potential of that strategy.

School-or Site-Based Management

Studies that have examined the decentralization of authority to schools have raised questions about the logic of the theory (Hannaway, 1993, 1996; Wohlstetter and Odden, 1992). One expectation, for example, is that school personnel and parents, as opposed to administrators in the central office, will focus more directly on teaching and learning. Studies show, however, that the participation of school-level participants, in particular parents and teachers, is weak (e.g., Malen and Ogawa, 1988; Easton and Storey, 1994; Hess, 1993) and that decisions do not

Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×

seem to focus more heavily on teaching and learning concerns (e.g., Hess, 1993; Weiss and Cambone, 1994).

Consistent with this finding, a review of 18 studies by Summers and Johnson (1996) found not only little effect on student achievement but also little effect on the expected behavior of schools and school participants. Few of the studies even attempted to estimate impacts on achievement (suggesting that higher student achievement may not have been the goal) and those that did estimate impacts on achievement found no statistically significant impacts, although some found that school-based management programs had a positive, but small, impact on student attendance.

The most dramatic U.S. experiment with decentralization of authority to the school level is the 1988 Chicago reform that set up 550 local school councils in which parents had a statutory majority and which had the authority "to hire and fire the school principal, determine the school's educational priorities, and approve the spending of discretionary funds, eventually amounting to half a million dollars or more" (Shipps et al., 1998:1). The effects on student achievement were mixed at best. Some schools appeared to have improved student performance; others remained unchanged; and some performed worse (Bryk et al., 1998). About half the schools did not seem even to take advantage of the freedom and resources offered under the law to try to change their schools (Sebring et al., 1996). Some people have interpreted the fact that in 1995 Chicago increased central control in a striking way as an indication of the instability of decentralization reform efforts, which calls into question whether this form of school governance can exist in the turbulent and politically charged environment of big U.S. cities. However, others have interpreted the change as the logical extension of a decentralization strategy that is designed to increase student achievement (see Hess, 1999).

Odden and Busch (1998), drawing on an extensive body of recent research studies, conclude that newer strategies of SBM point to a series of organizational conditions that must exist at the school level for SBM to lead to improved student achievement. In their view, there are nine key steps that must characterize SBM: center change on student learning and a rigorous instructional program; involve all teachers in decision making; allow schools to recruit and select staff; invest in training and professional development; create a professional school culture; create a comprehensive school-based information system; provide rewards and sanctions; select principals who can facilitate and manage change; and give schools control over their budget.

Charter Schools

Charter schools represent a more complete form of decentralization than school-based management, in that schools are exempted from much district and state regulation in exchange for the accountability that comes from the possibility

Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×

that their charter will be revoked or of other sanctions imposed by the state. Charter schools are a relatively recent phenomenon, and few systematic studies about them are available. While no information is available yet on their contribution to student achievement, some information is available on whom they serve, limitations related to accountability, their effect on public schools, and the problems they face in obtaining funding.

Contrary to opponents' predictions, the early experience with charter schools does not support the view that they disproportionately serve white and economically advantaged students (U.S. Department of Education, 1998b; Vanourek et al., 1997). The second-year report of a national study of charter schools showed that, while in 1996–97 they enrolled a smaller proportion of students with disabilities than other public schools in their state, their racial composition, the proportion of low-income students, and the proportion of students with limited English proficiency were similar to statewide averages. Moreover, when the analysis was extended to the district level, it showed that about 60 percent of charter schools were not racially distinct from their districts and another third enrolled a distinctly higher percentage of minority students than the district. Racial/ethnic enrollment patterns differ, however, across states with charter schools, with some states (California, Colorado, and Arizona) having a somewhat higher average percentage of white students in charter schools than in all public schools, whereas others (Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Texas, and Wisconsin) had lower average percentages of white students in charter schools (U.S. Department of Education, 1998b).

With respect to accountability, Wohlstetter and Griffin (1998:14–15) found that in practice "the myth of greater accountability for charter schools far exceeded the reality." Although the 17 schools in their study reported that they appreciated the value of a sound accountability system, not one had such a system in place and the schools derided the use of externally imposed standardized tests because they would not assess accurately what the school was trying to accomplish. Similarly, a study of charter schools in ten California districts (UCLA Charter School Study, 1998) reported that, in most instances, charter schools were not yet being held accountable for enhancing the academic achievement of their students; they were more likely to be held fiscally accountable.

One of the rationales for charter schools is that they will promote greater effectiveness and efficiency in regular public schools. In the only study of this issue of which we are aware, Rofes (1998) conducted case studies of 25 randomly selected school districts in which charter schools were operating. Although more work on this issue would be desirable, his findings are suggestive. Based on interview data, he concluded that about one-quarter of the school districts responded to charters in an energetic way and had significantly altered their educational programs. In one district, for example, the formation of a local charter served as a catalyst for improving the district's middle school. Other responses included opening schools organized around a specific theme, setting up pilot

Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×

schools, creating add-on programs such as an after-school program or an all-day kindergarten, and offering more diverse activities or curricular resources. Another quarter of the respondents responded more moderately by making significant efforts to aggressively market their schools to the public or by becoming more receptive to community input.

From the perspective of school finance, the most striking aspect is the financial disadvantage under which many charter schools operate. In many states, charter schools receive as operating expenses just the state share of operating revenues, not the combined state and local revenue that is available to the public schools. Even more burdensome is the lack of capital and start-up funds. A large percentage of charter schools, particularly those for which the charter was granted by nondistrict entities or those that are start-up schools, have no access to local district funds levied for capital improvements and do not have access to the capital market. As a result, most charter schools, are forced to use a portion of their operating funds or to seek funds from private sources to secure, furnish, and maintain facilities (Bierlein and Fulton, 1996). Furthermore, except in two states (Arizona and New Mexico), charter schools receive no extra state support for planning or implementation.

Without minimizing the conceptual difficulties of determining a charter school's fair share of funding, the committee simply notes that charter schools in most states have not been put on the level playing field with the public schools that would allow them to compete effectively. At the same time, we note that fair treatment with respect to the financing of capital facilities could increase overall costs of providing education unless existing school facilities are turned over to the charter schools or are sold or rented out.

The jury is still out on charter schools. Early interest and enthusiasm for them has probably been far greater than most policy makers expected, but the difficulty of establishing these schools is probably also far greater. Moreover, no information is yet available on their impacts on student achievement.

Contracting with Private Firms

Contracting with private firms would appear to have some important advantages over the alternative of enabling groups to set up charter schools. Unlike the charter schools for which start-up capital is a serious problem, private firms have access to capital that allows them to expand and make investments. In addition, because firms could run multiple schools, they are able to operate like a ''virtual" school district and can ensure that the schools they run have sufficient capacity to operate effectively. In addition, they have strong incentives to provide quality control to preserve the firm's reputation. Third, contracting gives the school district more control over the types of schools being provided without its being involved in the running of the schools. However, the well-publicized experiences

Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×

of Baltimore and Hartford with the private firm of Education Alternatives Inc. (EAI) did not give contracting a good name.

Part of the problem in Baltimore was that the school district negotiated a bad contract with EAI that required the district to pay more to EAI to run nine elementary schools than it would have cost to run the schools themselves. This outcome occurred because the district agreed to pay the average per-pupil cost of running all schools in the district rather than the average cost of running the cheaper elementary schools (Walsh, 1995; Brown and Hunter, 1996). Despite its additional funds. EAI was unable to produce any positive effects on student achievement. Although EAI initially released test score results that showed improvements in the schools it managed, these scores were later discredited when the Baltimore school district released district scores that showed student performance in the EAI schools was lagging. A University of Maryland study also shows that EAI schools in Baltimore produced no real difference in student performance or in the impact of technology on learning (Molnar, 1996). For this reason, as well as concerns by the district about some of EAI's practices, such as moving students out of special education classes and the use of college interns as teachers' aides, Baltimore terminated its contract with EAI in 1995 (Molnar, 1996). The experience of Hartford was a bit different, in that EAI was hired to perform back office management functions in that city rather than to operate the schools, but that contract too was cancelled in early 1996.

The Edison Project has had the longest history in operating contract schools, but data on its effects is limited and the number of schools still relatively small. Thanks in part to the growth of charter schools, however, the firm is now growing. The school year 1997–98 marked the third year of Edison's operation and at that time, the company had 25 public school partnerships serving nearly 13,000 students. For 1998–99, the number of schools was expected to increase to 75. The only data available on student test scores are reported by Edison itself (although they are compiled by independent researchers). Comparisons of changes in test scores between Edison's student and a control group indicated some positive effects overall (Edison Project, 1997). At least one school showed striking gains, but in others there were small declines. No public information is available on the other private firms, including the Sylvan Learning Systems, that have emerged in this market.

In sum, solid information on the effects of these initial trials with private firms is limited. Moreover, little is known about how such firms will behave over time as their need to show profits increases and, indeed, it is not yet clear whether the firms will be able to provide a high-quality product and still make a profit. The one bright light for the Edison Project and other private firms is that the expansion of state charter school legislation has opened up a new opportunity to run schools as charter schools, which could give these firms a chance to grow enough to benefit from economies of scale.

Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×
Conclusions about School-Oriented Policies

On the basis of the evidence, we cannot be assured that any of these approaches will by itself fulfill the goal of higher achievement in a cost-efficient manner. However, we note that the newness of the charter school movement makes it difficult to evaluate. Charter schools may well fulfill their proponents' predictions about exerting productive impacts on the rest of the public school system sometime in the future, and indeed preliminary evidence of these impacts is positive in some areas.

In fact, in the committee's view, some of these options are likely to be quite promising for the goal of increasing achievement, especially if they are included as part of a larger education reform strategy that encompasses, for example, clear outcomes-based accountability standards. Additional flexibility at the school level may be crucial as a way to achieve greater achievement, given the absence of a clear and identifiable production function for education that applies to all students. However, that flexibility will be productive in increasing achievement only to the extent that higher achievement is the goal, that schools are somehow held accountable for achievement, and that teachers have the capacity to teach effectively and students the capacity to learn.

Effects of Greater Parental Choice on Student Achievement and Efficiency

Many parents already exercise school choice, through their choice of where to live or by electing to enroll their children in private schools. One problem with the first form of choice is that by bundling the choice of school with the residential choice decision, any tendencies toward residential segregation by income or race will be exacerbated. Another disadvantage to either form of choice is that not all families can exercise it equally. Rather, wealthier families have more options than poorer families as they can more easily move to another location, or alternatively they could send their children to private schools. Moreover, low-income families in big-city school districts have even fewer choices than others, since even if they move to another location within the city they still receive education services from the same district. We return in Chapter 7 to the implications of the constrained choice available to low-income families in large urban areas.

Various strategies have been proposed, and implemented, to expand parental choice and to break the connection between residential location and choice of schools. Historically, the goal of many strategies that provide for more choice within a district, such as for example magnet schools and controlled choice programs, had more to do with reducing racial segregation than with increasing student achievement or making schools more efficient. Newer forms of parental choice include open enrollment schemes that allow children to choose schools in

Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×

other districts, charter schools, and vouchers that can be used in any public or private school.

Of interest here is what we know about the effects of parental choice either on student achievement or on the productive efficiency of the education system. Economists have been particularly interested in the issue of efficiency, so we begin with some theoretical predictions about choice that emerge from the economics literature before turning to the empirical evidence. Our attention here to the predictions from economic theory are not intended to discount other mechanisms, such as the contribution of parental choice to the development of schools as organizations with shared values, which also could lead to greater productivity. Instead, we include the economic predictions here because of the insight they provide about different forms of choice programs. The point is that choice programs differ in their potential to increase the efficiency of the education system. Moreover, the impacts of the various choice programs are likely to vary by type of district.

Economic Predictions about Different Forms of Choice

Economic theory suggests that schools or districts will operate inefficiently unless they are disciplined by competitive market pressures. Given this perspective, not all forms of parental choice are likely to be equally effective in promoting production efficiency. For example, choice programs within districts may provide pressure for individual schools to become more effective as they attempt to retain students, but provide no pressure for the district administration itself to become more efficient. Choice programs between districts could provide some of that pressure, as districts would be in danger of losing some of their students to other districts. However, in an interdistrict choice program, some economists worry that an important link between education quality and housing values will be weakened. According to this argument, residents in a district have an incentive to care about the quality of education provided by the district to maintain housing values in the district. With an interdistrict choice program, students have access to the district's school without residing in the district, which breaks the link between the quality of neighborhood schools and house values, and thereby the monitoring function could be weakened. These two offsetting incentives could conceivably lead to a reduction of school quality in a district.

Charter schools are, in principle, quite different from other forms of public school choice because of the potential for entry and exit. Unlike other forms of choice, charter schools have the potential to undercut the monopoly power accorded to a public school in a typical public system in the United States. A charter school might enter and supplant an ineffective public school. Similarly, a charter school is not endowed with the monopoly rights to a geographic area in the way that public schools typically are. So, in principle, the force of entry brings charter schools closer to the textbook competitive norm than other forms

Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×

of open enrollment. Similarly, voucher-like arrangements have the potential to encourage entry of schools that would potentially supplant ineffective public schools. The significant point here is that many economists believe that parental choice is likely to lead to the greatest gains in productive efficiency when there is the potential for a supply-side response in the form of the entry of new schools or the closing down of existing schools.

Types and Quality of Empirical Evidence

Empirical evidence on the effects of parental choice on achievement and productive efficiency comes in various forms, some of which are more reliable than others. Because there has been a large amount of choice within the education system for a long period of time, there are a huge number of studies of the effects of choice. Not all of these studies, however, shed light on the question in which we are interested: Would the introduction of significantly more parental choice into the education system increase achievement or the productivity of the system? Moreover, some of the studies are far better than others, either because of the study design or because of the quality of the data.

The evidence, which is far from perfect, provides some limited support for the view that parental choice can lead to better educational outcomes. This evidence comes from a number of sources. Rouse (1997) and Greene et al. (1997) found that students in the Milwaukee voucher program showed achievement gains, especially in mathematics. Evidence from some of the privately funded programs has also begun to emerge: Peterson et al. (1998), for example, found that New York students who received vouchers from a private foundation scored higher on standardized tests. This study is noteworthy because it is the first one to be based on a true experimental design. Because the program was oversubscribed, those who were awarded a voucher were selected at random. Thus the evaluation is based entirely on the comparisons between those who were selected and those who were not selected for a voucher.2 In addition, there is some evidence that Catholic schools are more effective than public schools. Evans and Schwab (1995), for example, find that Catholic school students are more likely to finish high school and go on to college.

But while this evidence is suggestive, it would be very difficult to argue that it constitutes an ironclad case in favor of more parental choice. In many cases, researchers looking at the same problem have come to very different conclusions. Witte et al. (1995), for example, conclude that the Milwaukee experience offers no evidence that private schools have been more effective. Neal (1997) and

2  

 Issues still arise about how to handle the applicants who were awarded a voucher but did not use it, especially given that the researchers had a lower success rate in testing those students than in testing the students who used the voucher.

Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×

Figlio and Stone (1997) conclude that while urban minority students often realize significant benefits from a Catholic school education, Catholic schools are no more effective than public schools for other types of students.

The problem here in part is the ability of researchers to control fully for unmeasured differences among students and families. To be sure, the recent studies of Catholic school students have made great strides compared with earlier studies in controlling for the selection bias that arises because the students who choose differ from those who do not. Nonetheless, Catholic school students and students who use vouchers to attend private schools in Milwaukee differ from other children in at least one fundamental way that is difficult to control for using standard statistical procedures: someone was willing and able to take the necessary steps to take them out of the public schools. Research (e.g., Wells and Crain, 1997) has shown that parent-child relationships are very different in families that exercised their option to participate in a school-choice plan. Choosers (in all income groups) are more actively involved in their children's educations and more actively direct their children in important decisions. It is possible to mistakenly attribute the success of children whose parents choose private school for them to the school rather than to differences in parenting. Similar problems will arise if private schools are able to successfully screen potential students or expel students as a result of poor behavior and poor academic performance. (This problem, however, does not apply to the New York City privately funded voucher program described above.) Hence, evidence from the statistical studies is at best suggestive.

Of interest is not only the effect of choice on the achievement of the choosers but also its effect, through the competition for students, on the traditional public schools. In addition to one interview study on this issue related to charter schools already cited (Rofes, 1998), more general research on this question is provided by Caroline Hoxby, who makes use of the variation across school districts in the amount of competition they face naturally from public schools in other districts or from private schools to draw inferences about the effects of a voucher program on overall student achievement. Hoxby (forthcoming) concludes that districts with less concentration of enrollment (more competition) have higher test scores and that competition makes a bigger difference in districts with less educated adults (where less than 20 percent of the adults have a bachelor's degree) and in districts in states with more local control. Because this study focuses on the form of choice that is most common in the United States, choice among public school districts, the evidentiary base is large. Moreover, the study is ambitious in that it uses data from a number of large U.S. databases and explicitly addresses the potential problem of reverse causation.

In two other studies, Hoxby (1995, 1996) measures the effect of competition from private schools and concludes again that such competition increases the achievement of students in the public schools. If Hoxby's results are correct, they are potentially very important. However, technical criticisms have been

Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×

raised in connection with her papers on private schools as well as some questions of interpretation (Kane, 1996). In addition, in contrast to the Hoxby findings, a new study by Sander (forthcoming) that examines the effects of private schools on the achievement of public school students in Illinois finds no direct effects. Like Hoxby, Sander uses Catholic religion as a means of identifying the private school effect, and in particular, of addressing the statistical problem of simultaneity that arises because in areas with poor public schools more students are likely to opt out of the public school system in favor of private schools. Given these conflicting findings, the question of the effect of competition on public schools must be considered unsettled at this point.

In sum, the U.S. research on parental choice, including choice that extends to private schools, is limited largely by the absence of experience on a large scale with voucher programs or with broad-based choice programs that break the link between residential location and school choice. Much remains to be learned about the potential for choice to increase student achievement. The most urgent context for that additional learning appears to be in urban areas, with their large concentrations of disadvantaged students.

It is worth noting, however, that other countries have had more experience with parental choice programs that break the link between place of residence and schooling, including some public funding of private schools, than has the United States. The experience from Europe with those programs provides reasonably clear evidence of the potential for an undesirable side effect of some choice programs, namely that schools may become more socially stratified (Vandenberghe, 1996, for Belgium; Ambler, 1994 for France; and Karsten, 1994, for The Netherlands). The mechanism by which competition might increase stratification is intimately tied with how parents choose schools. For example, to the extent that parents' perceptions about the quality of a school depend in part on the socioeconomic characteristics of the students in the school, parents will tend to transfer their children into districts or schools with higher average incomes (Fossey, 1994; Armor and Peiser, 1997; Fowler, 1995; 1996). In Scotland, which includes state-subsidized private schools and public school open enrollments, most parents appear to choose schools based on the social status of the student body (Glenn, 1990). Similarly, Echols and Willms (1995) find that Scottish parents who choose are more educated, have a higher occupational status, and tend to select schools with high average test scores and socioeconomic status.

School choice programs will not necessarily increase social stratification. Indeed, there are many examples in the United States (such as the experience with magnet schools and with some of the new voucher programs that are restricted to low-income parents) that do just the reverse. Such an effect can be avoided by careful attention to the design of a choice program, an issue to which we return in Chapter 9.

Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×

CONCLUSIONS

Although this review of knowledge provides no silver bullet strategy for raising student achievement, it provides a variety of promising policy directions for designing an improved financing system, one that will harness school finance more closely to the goal of increasing achievement for all students. Provided the existing system of school governance is maintained essentially in its current form, the committee's main conclusions are that capacity building and incentive strategies must be designed with careful attention to their effects on student achievement and that they will need to be combined in thoughtful ways if they are to promote the goal of higher achievement for all students in a cost-effective way. For example, a policy of investing in the capacity of existing teachers is likely to be more effective if it is combined with a change in incentives that make performance count than if it is implemented by itself. Similarly, the success of a program designed to hold schools accountable may depend on the extent to which teachers have access to the skills they need to improve the performance of their students. That still leaves open for policy makers, however, the significant choice of whether to try to promote higher achievement and greater productivity of the education system primarily within the context of the existing system or to opt for major changes in the system of school governance.

Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×
Page 163
Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×
Page 164
Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×
Page 165
Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×
Page 166
Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×
Page 167
Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×
Page 168
Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×
Page 169
Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×
Page 170
Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×
Page 171
Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×
Page 172
Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×
Page 173
Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×
Page 174
Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×
Page 175
Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×
Page 176
Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×
Page 177
Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×
Page 178
Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×
Page 179
Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×
Page 180
Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×
Page 181
Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×
Page 182
Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×
Page 183
Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×
Page 184
Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×
Page 185
Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×
Page 186
Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×
Page 187
Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×
Page 188
Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×
Page 189
Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×
Page 190
Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×
Page 191
Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×
Page 192
Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×
Page 193
Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×
Page 194
Suggested Citation:"6 Achieving Goal 1: Promoting Higher Achievment in a Cost-Efficient Way." National Research Council. 1999. Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9606.
×
Page 195
Next: 7 Achieving Goal 2: Breaking the Nexus »
Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools Get This Book
×
Buy Hardback | $75.00 Buy Ebook | $59.99
MyNAP members save 10% online.
Login or Register to save!
Download Free PDF

The United States annually spends over $300 billion on public elementary and secondary education. As the nation enters the 21st century, it faces a major challenge: how best to tie this financial investment to the goal of high levels of achievement for all students. In addition, policymakers want assurance that education dollars are being raised and used in the most efficient and effective possible ways. The book covers such topics as:

  • Legal and legislative efforts to reduce spending and achievement gaps.
  • The shift from "equity" to "adequacy" as a new standard for determining fairness in education spending.
  • The debate and the evidence over the productivity of American schools.
  • Strategies for using school finance in support of broader reforms aimed at raising student achievement.

This book contains a comprehensive review of the theory and practice of financing public schools by federal, state, and local governments in the United States. It distills the best available knowledge about the fairness and productivity of expenditures on education and assesses options for changing the finance system.

  1. ×

    Welcome to OpenBook!

    You're looking at OpenBook, NAP.edu's online reading room since 1999. Based on feedback from you, our users, we've made some improvements that make it easier than ever to read thousands of publications on our website.

    Do you want to take a quick tour of the OpenBook's features?

    No Thanks Take a Tour »
  2. ×

    Show this book's table of contents, where you can jump to any chapter by name.

    « Back Next »
  3. ×

    ...or use these buttons to go back to the previous chapter or skip to the next one.

    « Back Next »
  4. ×

    Jump up to the previous page or down to the next one. Also, you can type in a page number and press Enter to go directly to that page in the book.

    « Back Next »
  5. ×

    Switch between the Original Pages, where you can read the report as it appeared in print, and Text Pages for the web version, where you can highlight and search the text.

    « Back Next »
  6. ×

    To search the entire text of this book, type in your search term here and press Enter.

    « Back Next »
  7. ×

    Share a link to this book page on your preferred social network or via email.

    « Back Next »
  8. ×

    View our suggested citation for this chapter.

    « Back Next »
  9. ×

    Ready to take your reading offline? Click here to buy this book in print or download it as a free PDF, if available.

    « Back Next »
Stay Connected!