More Money for Massachusetts Schools?

Will It Make Them Better? 

An increasing number of studies in Massachusetts and across the country have cast doubt on the proposition that more resources are the key to improving our schools. Americans spend more than almost anyone on their schools, but that American schools add the least to students' knowledge, according to a recent Fordham Foundation study. 

The Center for Education Reform issued a report in June, "Truth in Spending:  The Cost of Not Educating Our Children," concluding that "Billions of dollars continue to be wasted, absorbed by layers of administration and countless regulations that serve only to stifle dynamic innovation and school-level reform." 

Smaller class size is among the most widely popular goals in education reform, repeatedly called for by public school advocates such as the American Association of School Administrators, and central to President Clinton's agenda. 

The American Federation of Teachers, the nation's second-largest teacher union, has argued that "the research is unequivocal" that smaller classes are better than privatization in improving student performance. 

But recent research has suggested that the connection between small classes and student performance may be false.  Dr. Eric Hanushek of the University of Rochester concluded that "Broadly reducing class sizes is extraordinary expensive and, based on years of research, very ineffective."  He notes that "between 1950 and 1995, pupil-teacher ratios fell nationally by 35 percent.  Yet test scores have not gone up." 

Improving teacher quality and student performance standards are more important, but also more difficult and politically complicated goals. One of the most politically popular proposals to improve education is to increase spending on technology, but the lack of any hard evidence that computers help to raise student achievement is beginning to undermine this argument, as pointed out in the May issue of the Education Reporter. 
 

Six years ago, the Beacon Hill Institute issued a study, "More Money for Massachusetts Schools: A Poor Investment," that also cast doubt on the value of spending to improve school quality.  The report also concluded that parents in highest spending districts often opted out of their well-funded public schools altogether, and that this option provided the choice and competition needed to keep the public schools on their toes. 
 

Similar conclusions about the value of school choice come from a recent  Hudson Institute report. Not only do private schools usually achieve more with less money, but teachers are willing to take lower salaries and forego tenure to teach in them. 

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