In recent years, a number of education researchers have been saying that it really doesn't matter how much money we spend on schools and teachers and books and technology because, in education, there is no connection between money and outcomes.
But most people who've had choices to make haven't believed these findings. Parents with money sent their kids to expensive private schools or they moved to the suburbs where teachers were paid well, class sizes were small and there were plenty of computers to go around. And when people in wealthy school districts faced the prospect of losing some of their school funding to poorer districts, they put up a fight-obviously they didn't think money was irrelevant. President Bush, Lamar Alexander and Chester Firm, all of whom made a big point about the unimportance of money to a good education, didn't act as though they believed this, either-at least not when it came to their kids.
In "Paying for Public Education: New Evidence on How and Why Money Matters" (Harvard Journal on Legislation, Summer 1991), Ronald F. Ferguson, who teaches at Harvard's John F Kennedy School of Government, takes a new look at the question, examining scores on Texas student achievement and teacher certification tests in relation to teacher salaries, and he finds a strong connection between money and student achievement.
The Texas school reform of the 1980s required all teachers to take certification tests, whether or not they were already certified, so many thousands of teachers were tested. It also required the millions of students in grades three, seven, nine and eleven to take achievement tests. As a result, Ferguson had access to an enormous database-test results for 2.4 million students and 150,000 teachers in 900 of Texas's 1,000 school districts-and this gives him far more information to work with than any of his predecessors.
What did he uncover? His basic finding is that in districts where teachers had higher scores on the certification test, students also scored higher on achievement tests. In fact, Ferguson says, when you eliminate things that influence student achievement and are beyond the control of the schools-like parental education-you can account for one-fifth to one-quarter of the differences in students' test scores just by looking at their teachers' scores.
Ferguson also found that teacher experience influenced how well students did and so did class size and whether or not the teacher had a master's degree. Kids whose teachers had been teaching five or more years did better on the achievement tests, as did elementary school students whose teachers had a master's degree. And children in school districts with a limit of 18 students per teacher scored better than children in districts with a larger pupil-teacher ratio.
Where does the money come in? Small class size costs extra money. Moreover, districts that had the highest salaries got the teachers who had the better grades on the teacher certification test and more experience. In other words, the teachers whose kids scored well on the achievement tests were concentrated in good-paying districts. Ferguson does not claim to know what these high-scoring teachers did that made them more effective in the classroom. But his finding suggests an answer to one of our biggest education problems-the achievement gap between children in poor, minority and middle class school districts.
Right now, school districts with the most educated parents, the highest teacher salaries and the smallest class size are able to get the pick of teachers-and they undoubtedly hire the ones who would be high scorers on the Texas test. But why not encourage state policies that would give poor districts a chance to hire their fair share of such teachers? Why not give them a subsidy that would allow them to offer too salaries, too?
This would be a big short-term investment but its long-term implications would be enormous. Having well-educated parents has a tremendous impact on a child's education. This has been shown over and over, and Ferguson confirms it here. If you can take some kids whose parents are not well-educated and educate them, their children will have a far better chance of becoming educated, too. Instead of confirming a cycle of failure, you are initiating a cycle of success. This creates a tremendous sense of hope.
When a researcher comes up with statistics that seem to confirm the commonly held view that there's no point in spending money on education, it makes the headlines and is treated with great respect. But here we have an important piece of research. It has a larger database than any of the previous studies; it is more recent; and it says that money has a powerful effect on student achievement. No one has covered it. Why?