Posted on 02/20/2017 5:32:01 AM PST by MichCapCon
In some circles, the myth persists that more money automatically translates into better education results. At a recent legislative hearing to explore changes to the state’s failing-schools law, one education official made a claim that collapses under a brief examination.
According to MIRS News, Sen. Hoon-Yung Hopgood, D-Taylor, posed a question to a panel of witnesses about the relationship between funding and performance. But if the implication of his question was failing schools need more money before they can be fixed, the evidence is against him. The recently released final evaluation of the U.S. Department of Education’s $7 billion School Improvement Grant program showed that it “failed to produce meaningful results.”
At the hearing, Saginaw Intermediate School District Superintendent Kathy Stewart responded to Hopgood’s question: “If you ranked the schools in the Saginaw area one through 12 based on funding, they'd probably rank pretty much the same in proficiency.”
There are 12 conventional school districts within the Saginaw ISD. Of those, Saginaw Public School District and Bridgeport-Spaulding Community School District have the ISD’s only four schools rated among the state’s bottom 5 percent. The two districts, specifically highlighted in Stewart’s testimony, include 15 open enrollment schools. All but one is in the bottom 20 percent of the rankings.
Yet no district in the ISD receives more general fund dollars per student than Saginaw or Bridgeport-Spaulding. If you count all revenues, the districts rank first and third, respectively, within the ISD.
On the other hand, two of the Saginaw ISD’s lowest-funded school districts — Swan Valley and Freeland — operate some of the county’s highest-performing schools on the state of Michigan’s Top-to-Bottom Rankings. Only the Frankenmuth School District outshines them, with its high school and middle school both rated in the top 10 percent. Frankenmuth ranks fourth out of 12 in terms of spending.
Whether we count general fund or all revenues, Saginaw ISD districts show a stronger relationship between more funding and lowing ratings than less funding and lower ratings. Of course, this cursory analysis is neither rigorous nor statistically significant. And the state’s Top-to-Bottom Rankings represent a better proxy for poverty than for quality.
But even a more rigorous evaluation shows the same result. A 2016 Mackinac Center analysis revealed no connection between increased spending and 27 of 28 different measures of student achievement.
The Michigan Education Finance Study (or “adequacy study”) delivered to legislators last June reached a slightly different, but not very promising, conclusion. It found that for each $1,000 per student in additional spending, schools could raise mathematics and reading achievement scores by one percentage point. By those calculations, an additional $5,000 per student, or $7.5 billion statewide, would ensure that only 55 percent of Michigan third-graders could read on grade level and one-third of Michigan high school juniors were proficient in math.
Taking the adequacy study’s generous assumptions to heart, reaching critical educational goals for the state’s students would require breaking the bank. That isn’t going to happen. Yet even if the money were magically available, the dubious relationship between greater spending and achievement — not only in Saginaw County but statewide — should give citizens and lawmakers a reason to pause.
In the pursuit of ways to rescue failing schools and improve outcomes for students all over Michigan, the answer is not “more money.”
Sounds about right. Lower your performance results and then get rewarded for it.
Brilliant!
Only in a corrupt, politicized system are laggards rewarded.
Education is too critical to be left to the whims of unaccountable bureaucrats and political hacks.
I’d like to see a ranking by performance vs spending normalized by # of students.
If it’s just spending per school the data isn’t that meaningful.
That is government in general. Fail and get more money and a bigger empire.
To really solve problems requires analysis and effort.
Unfortunately, the left is not strong in these points. So they throw more money at the problem, hoping that it will magically disappear. But it won’t.
They need to apply problem-solving methodology. Unfortunately, an analysis might show that the problem lies in the culture of the students entering the school—and the solution to that is difficult and time-consuming.
Not surprised in the least. Here in Austin, we had this one high school, that for as long as I can remember was consistently ranked dead last in terms of performance. Yet, it was at the top of the list for district spending. They just kept throwing more and more money at it. Consequently, the schools at the very bottom of the spending list were the highest performing. And these schools were not always in the most affluent areas of town. The biggest factor I believe to their success was that these schools had the highest levels of parent engagement and the teachers were held to a high standard.
Well, everyone knows that the solution to the problem is to throw more money at it. Not. The real problem with giving more money to any bureaucratic organization is that its spent on the wrong things. And make no mistake, education is immersed in a huge, ineffective bureaucratic organization.
A most classic case of ‘perverse incentive’.
Bottom line to all of this is the culture. It’s parents who support the school and make sure their kids do their homework vs. parents who don’t give a rat’s rear. You can throw money at the schools in the rat’s rear group all day long and it’s not going to see one ounce of improvement.
We placed our kids in a church preschool for 6 hours a week. All but one of those kids graduated public high school with honors. We would joke it was because of the preschool, but of course it was because the parents were involved in the school and saw that their kids studied and did their schoolwork.
The liberal solution to everything - throw money at it (most likely, someone else’s money.)
If anyone is interested in the Canadian story on this. I can only speak for my province, BC, but we in essence have a voucher system, just that the money is flowed through the actual private schools. The general rule of thumb is we get half our tuition covered by the province. My children, 3 of them cost me about $6000 a year, but would have cost $12,000 without the province pitching in. Even with that the Teacher union hates it. If a political party was ever to curry favor with the BCTF, they would demand defunding of private schools.
The main difference is overstaffing. In our private school students register in the late winter for the coming year. A budget it done and numbers counted and then how many teachers and teacher aid staff is needed. In public school it is way less efficient.
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