Measuring educational performance and understanding its determinants are important for designing policies with respect to such varying issues as teacher accountability, educational finance systems, and school integration. Unfortunately, past analyses of student achievement and educational production relationships have been plagued by both a lack of conceptual clarity and a number of potentially severe analytical problems. As a result, there is considerable confusion not only about what has been learned, but also about how such studies should be conducted and what can be learned. This review considers each of these issues and also relates knowledge from these studies to research about areas other than just school operations and performance.

Conceptual and Empirical Issues in the Estimation of Educational Production Functions

This paper develops a theoretical context with which to understand the evidence on effective schools. I begin by specifying a central problem in the operation of inner-city schools--that good teachers are difficult to recruit and almost impossible to retain because the rewards of teaching do not outweigh the frustrations. Exceptions to this are identified in effective schools--schools that are distinctive in important ways. Principals of effective schools have a unitary mission of improved student learning, and their actions convey certainty that these goals can be attained. Such actions include recruiting outstanding teachers who have goals similar to their own and to those of other staff, organizationally buffering teachers to ensure that their efforts are directed toward raising student achievement, monitoring the academic progress teachers make, supplying additional technical assistance to needy teachers, and providing--mostly in concert with teaching colleagues--the opportunities to establish strateg...

/pdf/effective-schools-interpreting-the-evidence-1jaopvdxe9.pdf

Effective Schools: Interpreting the Evidence.

Responses to questions given to a random sample of Michigan households are used to estimate public spending demand functions. While income and price elasticities are similar to those obtained from aggregate data, positive income elasticities appear to arise because public services are distributed in a prorich manner. A relatively small variance in spending demands among urban and suburban communities in metropolitan areas with substantial public service variety suggests that the Tiebout mechanism works. This interpretation is supported by the fact that actual spending conforms substantially to desired levels in urban areas, but less so in rural areas with little public sector choice.

Micro Estimates of Public Spending Demand Functions and Tests of the Tiebout and Median-Voter Hypotheses

The debate over whether educational spending shapes achievement has persisted for decades, largely because of methodological and analytical limitations associated with the use of districtlevel data. In this study, the authors analyzed unique within-district variations in spending and achievement among 89 public elementary schools in a large, North Central, urban district. The analyses reveal considerable disparities in spending within the district, which are linked to local patterns of racial and class stratification and concentration. They show how these locally driven inequalities and their links to specific school resources have consequences for achievement in five distinct subject areas. The authors conclude by discussing the implications of their findings for understanding the local production of class and racial educational inequality and recent moves toward resegregation that are evident in many U.S. cities. D espite decades of research and public policy debates on the topic, it is still unclear whether educational spending influences students' achievement. Some studies have suggested that there are no apparent effects of spending, while others have found that educational dollars indeed make a difference (see Burtless 1996). These debates and the research from which they have drawn have been limited for several reasons, not the least of which is the reliance on district-level data on spending (Farland 1997; Picus 1997). In this article, we extend the literature on educational spending and achievement by presenting our study, which analyzed the extent of variation in spending, its potential causes, and its consequences for students' achievement across 89 elementary schools within one urban school district. These unique, within-district, school-level data allowed us to delineate (1) significant withindistrict inequality in spending and its consequences for achievement; (2) the extent to which the disparities are associated with larger patterns of racial and class inequality and concentration; and (3) how spending matters, that is, the mechanisms that mediate the link between spending and achievement. We conclude this article by discussing the implications of our findings for understanding the dynamics of local stratification, school inequality, and depressed patterns of achievement that are evident in many urban areas of the United States.

Disparities Within: Unequal Spending and Achievement in an Urban School District.

https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED189066.pdf

Learning by doing, vintage, and selection: Three pieces of the puzzle relating teaching experience and teaching performance

Educational resources are distributed unequally within large American cities, with poor and nonwhite neighborhoods receiving less than their share. An empirical analysis of data for nine large cities shows that teacher salary expenditures per pupil are lower in low-income and non-white neighborhoods, and that the level of both teacher experience and verbal ability is also lower there. Much of this inequality can be explained by the teacher assignment system: a single city-wide salary schedule, the allocation of attractive teaching posts to the most experienced teachers, and, in some cities, informal pressures that are exerted to keep black teachers in black schools.

John D. Owen

Papers

The Distribution of Educational Resources in Large American Cities.