Giving Compass' Take:

• Kevin Mahnken explains how researchers pieced together a study that revealed that funding increases for poor school districts improve NAEP scores, but do not close achievement gaps. 

• How can funders sustainably increase funding for poor school districts? 

• Find out why poor school districts struggle to get help. 

More funding to low-income school districts lifts student achievement over time, according to an article published in the American Economic Journal. Its authors find that districts provided with increased revenues by school finance reforms see improvements in standardized test scores, though the extra money hasn’t helped close persistent gaps between various racial and socioeconomic groups.

In the 1990s and 2000s, respected economists made the case that spending more on schools was an ineffective method of improving outcomes for disadvantaged and minority students. This study, conducted by Jesse Rothstein and Julien LaFortune of the University of California, Berkeley, and Diane Schanzenbach of Northwestern, argues the opposite. In an interview with The 74, Rothstein said that access to new data over the past few decades has allowed researchers to more precisely observe the effect of funding on school performance.

“Until relatively recently, we really didn’t have much data either way,” he said. Skeptics had drawn “strong conclusions” from the lack of clear links between money and achievement, he added, “but the new data has made it possible to generate evidence — and evidence beats no evidence.”

Examining 64 school finance reforms (SFRs) in 26 states between 1990 and 2012, the study finds that state-led action to combat funding disparities between school districts results in sharp increases in per-pupil revenues. These infusions of money are, in turn, associated with noticeable improvements to students’ math and reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Those effects are roughly twice the size, per dollar, as those of Tennessee’s Project STAR, a successful, federally funded class-size-reduction experiment that is often used as a comparison for education initiatives.

Read the full article about funding increases for poor school districts by Kevin Mahnken at The 74.