Eric A. Hanushek

Assessing the Effects of School Resources on Student Performance : An Update

The relationship between school resources and student achievement has been controversial, in large part because it calls into question a variety of traditional policy approaches. This article reviews the available educational production literature, updating previous summaries. The close to 400 studies of student achievement demonstrate that there is not a strong or consistent relationship between student performance and school resources, at least after variations in family inputs are taken into account. These results are also reconciled with meta-analytic approaches and with other investigations on how school resources affect labor market outcomes. Simple resource policies hold little hope for improving student outcomes.

The Failure of Input-Based Schooling Policies

In an effort to improve the quality of schools, governments around the world have dramatically increased the resources devoted to them. By concentrating on inputs and ignoring the incentives within schools, the resources have yielded little in the way of general improvement in student achievement. This paper provides a review of the United States and international evidence on the effectiveness of such input policies. It then contrasts the impact of resources with that of variations in teacher quality that are not systematically related to school resources. Finally, alternative performance incentive policies are described.

THE TRADE-OFF BETWEEN CHILD QUANTITY AND QUALITY

An empirical investigation of trade-offs between number of children and their scholastic performance confirms that family size directly affects childrens achievement. Though parents show no favoritism to first-born children, being early in the birth order implies a distinct advantage, entirely because of the higher probability of being in a small family. Recent large changes in family size explain a portion of aggregate test score declines, but increased divorce rates and market work by mothers have no apparent impact. Finally, teachers are shown to differ enormously, even though performance differences are poorly captured by commonly measured teacher characteristics. The evidence supports a teacher skill interpretation of differences in classroom achievement.

Conceptual and Empirical Issues in the Estimation of Educational Production Functions

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.

The Impact of Differential Expenditures on School Performance

Two decades of research into educational production functions have produced startlingly consistent results: Variations in school expenditures are not systematically related to variations in student performance. Enormous differences in teacher quality exist, but differences in teacher skill are not strongly related to educational backgrounds, amount of teaching experience, or teaching in small classes. Further, more skilled teachers simply are not regularly paid more than less skilled teachers. These findings suggest that school decision making must move away from traditional “input directed” policies to ones providing performance incentives. The concentration on expenditure differences in, for example, school finance court cases or legislative deliberations, appears misguided given the evidence.

The Role of Education Quality for Economic Growth

The role of improved schooling, a central part of most development strategies, has become controversial because expansion of school attainment has not guaranteed improved economic conditions. This paper reviews the role of education in promoting economic well-being, focusing on the role of educational quality. It concludes that there is strong evidence that the cognitive skills of the population-rather than mere school attainment-are powerfully related to individual earnings, to the distribution of income, and to economic growth. New empirical results show the importance of both minimal and high-level skills, the complementarity of skills and the quality of economic institutions, and the robustness of the relationship between skills and growth. International comparisons incorporating expanded data on cognitive skills reveal much larger skill deficits in developing countries than generally derived from just school enrollment and attainment. The magnitude of change needed makes it clear that closing the economic gap with industrial countries will require major structural changes in schooling institutions.

New Evidence about "Brown v. Board of Education": The Complex Effects of School Racial Composition on Achievement.

Uncovering the effect of school racial composition is difficult because racial mixing is not accidental but instead an outcome of government and family choices. Using rich panel data on the achievement of Texas students, we disentangle racial composition effects from other aspects of school quality and from differences in abilities and family background. The estimates strongly indicate that a higher percentage of black schoolmates reduces achievement for blacks, while it implies a much smaller and generally insignificant effect on whites. These results suggest that existing levels of segregation in Texas explain a small but meaningful portion of the racial achievement gap.

The Economics of International Differences in Educational Achievement

An emerging economic literature over the past decade has made use of international tests of educational achievement to analyze the determinants and impacts of cognitive skills. The cross-country comparative approach provides a number of unique advantages over national studies: It can exploit institutional variation that does not exist within countries; draw on much larger variation than usually available within any country; reveal whether any result is country-specific or more general; test whether effects are systematically heterogeneous in different settings; circumvent selection issues that plague within-country identification by using system-level aggregated measures; and uncover general-equilibrium effects that often elude studies in a single country. The advantages come at the price of concerns about the limited number of country observations, the cross-sectional character of most available achievement data, and possible bias from unobserved country factors like culture. This chapter reviews the economic literature on international differences in educational achievement, restricting itself to comparative analyses that are not possible within single countries and placing particular emphasis on studies trying to address key issues of empirical identification. While quantitative input measures show little impact, several measures of institutional structures and of the quality of the teaching force can account for significant portions of the large international differences in the level and equity of student achievement. Variations in skills measured by the international tests are in turn strongly related to individual labor-market outcomes and, perhaps more importantly, to cross-country variations in economic growth.

Some Findings from an Independent Investigation of the Tennessee STAR Experiment and from Other Investigations of Class Size Effects

While random-assignment experiments have considerable conceptual appeal, the validity and reliability of results depends crucially on a number of design and implementation issues. This paper reviews the major experiment in class size reduction-Tennessee’s Project STAR-and puts the results in the context of existing nonexperimental evidence about class size. The nonexperimental evidence uniformly indicates no consistent improvement in achievement with class size reductions. This evidence comes from very different sources and methodologies, making the consistency of results quite striking. The experimental evidence from the STAR experiment is typically cited as providing strong support of current policy proposals to reduce class size. Detailed review of the evidence, however uncovers a number of important design and implementation issues that suggest considerable uncertainty about the magnitude of any treatment effects. Moreover there is reason to believe that the commonly cited results are biased upwards. Ignoring consideration of the uncertainties and possible biases in the experiment, the results show effects that are limited to very large (and expensive) reductions in kindergarten or possibly first grade class sizes. No support for smaller reductions in class size (i.e., reductions resulting in class sizes greater than 13–17 students) or for reductions in later grades is found in the STAR results.

Efficiency and Equity in Schools Around the World

Attention to the quality of human capital in different countries naturally leads to concerns about how school policies relate to student performance. The data from the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) provide a way of comparing performance in different schooling systems. The results of analyses of educational production functions within a range of developed and developing countries show general problems with the efficiency of resource usage similar to those found previously in the United States. These effects do not appear to be dictated by variations related to income level of the country or level of resources in the schools. Neither do they appear to be determined by school policies that involve compensatory application of resources. The conventional view that school resources are relatively more important in poor countries also fails to be supported.