But suggests that in an attempt to right these inequities, those reforms often got it wrong. 

State school finance policies designed to close funding gaps between high- and low-income districts did not reduce racial and ethnic funding inequities and in some cases increased them, according to a study published Wednesday by the American Educational Research Association. 

“I was quite surprised. And depressed, frankly,” said Emily Rauscher, lead co-author and professor at Brown University. “My guess going into the study was that these income based school finance reforms that worked to reduce inequality of funding by income would also at least slightly help reduce racial inequality of funding.”

The U.S. is unique in that school district budgets are tethered to property taxes, meaning schools in wealthier communities automatically start with a larger pot of local funding. Since school desegregation efforts slowed after the 1980s, civil-rights minded policymakers have tried fixing this discrepancy between low-income districts that serve lots of students of color and rich districts that serve lots of white students by directing more money to districts with more low-income kids.

State funds are typically distributed through a formula, or set of formulas, that send money to districts. From there, districts send it to schools. Each state uses different criteria in their formulas, but most try to target at least a portion of their funds to school districts that enroll lots of students with greater needs and those that struggle to raise funds from property taxes. Sometimes, courts make them do it.

According to the , the number of states with co-called “progressive” funding systems — where high-poverty districts receive more per-student funding than low-poverty districts — more than doubled, from 13 states in 2012 to 28 in 2022. States such as New Mexico, Wyoming, California, and Colorado saw some of the largest gains in funding equity during this period. As it stands, more than half of the 48 states studied have at least a modestly progressive distribution of state and local funding, providing at least 5% additional funding to high-poverty districts. That is twice as many states as a decade ago.

But Rauscher and co-author Jeremy Fiel, a professor at Rice University, found that while these reforms narrowed funding gaps by income, they did not lessen — and sometimes widened — disparities by race and ethnicity. 

Using data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the National Center for Education Statistics, the researchers examined the effects of school finance reforms across the U.S. from 1990 to 2022. They found that such policies reduced school spending gaps between the highest- and lowest-income districts by over $1,300 per pupil on average. However, the reforms also increased the spending advantage of districts with low percentages of Black and Hispanic students—by $900 and $1,000 per pupil, respectively.

Reforms were more effective at reducing racial disparities in states where those inequities were already relatively modest. In contrast, reforms were less effective, or even regressive, in states with high levels of racial and economic segregation between school districts. In these more segregated states, reforms not only exacerbated racial and ethnic disparities but also failed to narrow economic gaps.

While the study did not pinpoint the exact reason for this, researchers posited that it may be driven by demographic and political processes related to implementation. Additionally, many funding reforms boosted spending broadly rather than targeting it, leading to minimal effects. Many court-ordered solutions, by contrast, stipulate that states must target racial and ethnic inequality. 

Notably, the funding reforms worked best at directing money to historically marginalized students in districts that were less segregated, likely a reflection of separate policies aimed at supporting students of color, low-income students and their families, Rauscher said. Moreover, the study showed that the biggest inequities exist between states – not within them.

Rauscher offered that it’s likely not random that states funding their education systems the least are also the ones with the highest concentration of students of color. And that’s exactly why, she said, the federal government needs to step up to fix it. 

For many school funding experts, this realization is not surprising. After all, while most states distribute funding relatively evenly by the racial and ethnic composition of districts, wealthier states still spend significantly more per pupil than poorer ones. And since these states tend to have higher shares of white students and lower shares of Black and Hispanic students, national disparities are bound to persist.

“The concentration of non-white students is in the lowest-funded states, and the concentration of white students is in the highest-funded states,” says Rebecca Sibilia, executive director of EdFund, a nonprofit that funds school finance research. “So when you compare the funding levels of a low-income school district in Mississippi that has a lot of Black and Hispanic students to a tawny suburb of Boston in Massachusetts where all the kids are white, you’re going to pick up a huge gap. It just distorts the amount of money when you’re comparing across the entire U.S.”

It’s worth noting, Sibilia says, that recent state funding reforms, like those in Tennessee, Colorado, Mississippi and Alabama, are poised to make a real difference. Tennessee’s model, adopted three years ago, directs more funding to students who need it most, including those living in high concentrations of poverty. It also accounts for students in small and sparsely populated districts, which formulas sometimes shortchange. Meanwhile, Alabama’s model — the newest in the country — includes additional funds for students with special needs, such as those with disabilities or who are English language learners.

“There’s no way that you’re going to change interstate funding differences, because people are so focused on schools in their communities, and because half of the money is coming from local property taxes,” she says. “The federal government can’t touch those dollars, so you have to focus within the state. And when you look at the effect of the intrastate reforms, you tend to see that they’re working.”

The new research comes against the backdrop of the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the Education Department, eliminate policies aimed at increasing equity for students of color and significantly curb federal spending, including on long-standing programs like Title I and IDEA, which are the federal government’s two biggest levers for bolstering state education funding.

In other words, it’s a political environment not likely to prioritize issues of racial inequity.

“You’re never going to have a funding formula that says we’re going to add x hundreds of dollars per Black student in each state, because that’s just not a viable policy,” says Eric Hanushek, an economist and senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. “We’ve had these differences all along, and there’s no way that you’re going to suddenly get the federal government stepping in on overall spending differences between states.”

Rauscher says that given the political environment, she’s concerned that her research may be used in bad faith by policymakers who have no interest in closing racial gaps in education. 

Her message to them: “You are mortgaging the future of the country, because all these kids who are under-resourced in school are going to enter adulthood without adequate skills and training. It’s an ongoing battle. We’ve been here before.”

Released this morning through Stanford’s right-leaning Hoover Institution, the report prior by its author, one of the nation’s most cited experts on education finance. Hanushek has cautioned since the emergence of COVID that the prolonged experience of virtual instruction would meaningfully harm the skills and earning potential of today’s students.

His newest release builds on those predictions by examining the math performance of U.S. students on two standardized tests. One, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), is a worldwide exam comparing American 15-year-olds against adolescents in dozens of other countries; the other, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (often referred to as the Nation’s Report Card) is administered to fourth- and eighth-graders around the United States.

The PISA results, revealed in December, showed U.S. math scores falling significantly between 2018 and 2022, offering more evidence of what federal officials have called a COVID-era “crisis” in that subject. But because other countries saw even larger declines, America’s international ranking actually moved upward slightly, leading Education Secretary Miguel Cardona to the Biden administration’s emergency assistance to schools during the pandemic.

In an interview with The 74, Hanushek was much less sanguine, pointing to K–12 students’ persistently mediocre performance in math over the last few decades. After overlaying the NAEP math scores of individual U.S. states onto PISA’s international scoring system, he found that even test takers in the top-scoring state, Massachusetts, ranked below their counterparts in 15 other countries. The lowest-performing American jurisdiction, Puerto Rico, placed below developing nations like Kosovo, El Salvador and Cambodia.

“People in the past , ‘Massachusetts is doing pretty well, maybe we could get New Mexico going like that too,’” Hanushek said. “But if our best-performing state school system is 16th in the world, compared to the average kids in other countries, that doesn’t seem good to me.”

In general, the analysis shows, the top-line U.S. math ranking on PISA rose primarily because the pandemic’s disruptions to schooling were much more acutely felt in countries like Slovenia and Norway, which had been among the top performers on earlier iterations of the test.

Overall, students in relatively higher-scoring countries on the 2018 PISA exam sustained larger losses during COVID than those in countries that hadn’t done as well previously. Hanushek called the trend a “straightforward” validation of the importance of high-quality schools: Canadian students stood to lose more from weeks or months of online classes than those in less-effective Philippine schools.

“If you weren’t learning very much in school before the pandemic, you didn’t lose as much,” he said. “If you were learning a lot in school before the pandemic, you tended to lose more.”

The United States, long mired in the middle of the international pack, saw somewhat smaller math declines between 2018 and 2022 than the PISA average. Meanwhile, in spite of the clear trend, high-achieving East Asian countries like Taiwan, Singapore, Japan and South Korea actually improved in the subject during the pandemic. 

The learning loss exhibited in both NAEP and PISA strongly suggests that the long-term prospects of affected students will be substantially worse than they would have been otherwise. Martin West, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, said this is largely due to the very nature of the American economy, in which skills and educational attainment are more highly prized than almost anywhere else in the world.

“The U.S. is a society in which skills really do matter for economic success,” West said. “What that means is that the impact of learning loss on individual students through their earnings is going to be larger in the U.S. than it might be in a society like Sweden.”

Wide state variation

Hanushek’s total calculation for the cost of learning loss, a staggering $31 trillion through the year 2100, is a figure that would dwarf the economic damage wrought by the business closures and layoffs necessitated by COVID’s spread, or even the years of stalled dynamism following the Great Recession. 

The projection is based on prior economic research into the connection between students’ test scores and future earnings. Hanushek further posits that the aggregate slowdown in innovation and human capital development will tend to slow the U.S. economy’s growth over the long haul, burdening even those who didn’t experience learning loss themselves.

The analysis estimates a far greater toll than that of another prominent prediction. In 2022, economists Thomas Kane of Harvard and Douglas O. Staiger of Dartmouth used eighth-grade math results on the NAEP exam following the pandemic. While that estimate pointed to a 1.6 percent decline in students’ future earnings, Hanushek and co-author Bradley Strauss believe that slump will fall between 5 and 6 percent.

Staiger said his paper with Kane represented a “lowball estimate” while Hanushek’s offers an upper-bound projection, adding that most of the discrepancy between their findings likely stemmed from Hanushek’s broader lens on overall growth in addition to direct earnings. Whatever their differences, however, he noted that even marginal losses in productivity could eventually amount to considerable squandered potential.

“There are some that find smaller effects of test scores on economic growth, particularly for high-income countries like the U.S.,” Staiger wrote in an email. “However, as Hanushek and Strauss make clear, even small impacts of the learning loss on future economic growth impose enormous costs on society.” 

If Hanushek’s analysis proves correct, those costs will be borne unevenly. The largest state economies, such as California, Texas, New York, Florida and Pennsylvania, are all projected to absorb losses greater than $500 billion; their disproportionate burden reflects both the scope of their learning setbacks to this point and the number of future workers living in each. 

Individual income losses are also projected to differ considerably depending on location. By the paper’s calculations, students affected by the pandemic will lose less than 2 percent of their lifetime earnings in Utah, where math scores fell the least between 2019 and 2022. In West Virginia, Delaware, and Oklahoma, where they fell the most, former students could forgo an average of 9 percent of their career income.

Sarah Cohodes, an economist at the University of Michigan, said that the inequity of learning loss was a cause for particular concern. While the math performance of all students suffered between 2020 and the present, the losses were especially large for those who were already struggling or navigating critical life changes when COVID emerged. She referred to her own daughter, who wasn’t yet enrolled in a K–12 school when the pandemic began, as an example.

“She lost a year of preschool, but she’s going to be fine — she hung out with me and went to all the parks in New York City,” Cohodes said. “The people I worry about are the ones who were transitioning between elementary and middle school, or who graduated from high school and missed out on some of the final preparations for what comes next.”

Hanushek, whose preferred strategy for learning recovery is to provide financial incentives to top teachers in exchange for taking on more students, observed that the worst-off students were likely the high schoolers who graduated or dropped out over the last few years. The unsuccessful efforts to mitigate their academic reversals, whether led by state or federal officials, were evidence that education authorities “have not really taken seriously the magnitude of this event,” he argued.

“My calculation is that 17 million kids [affected by the pandemic] have already left school,” Hanushek said. “Once they’ve left school, we have little hope of ever fixing their problems. Universities or firms are not going to make up for the lack of learning that these kids suffered, and each year that goes by, we lose four or five million more kids that will never recover.”

Disclosure: The Hoover Institution provides financial support to The 74.

All significant harms. But then there’s the bottom-line figure that appeared last winter: $28 trillion.

�ճ󲹳�’s , to the children whose academic abilities were set back during the COVID-era, totalling about $70,000 per person over the course of their careers. The figure was reached by Stanford economist Eric Hanushek, based on the cratering eighth-grade math performance measured by last year’s National Assessment of Educational Progress. And it could be permanent if schools don’t do something about those diminished skills.

One of the studying American education, Hanushek has spent over 40 years studying how schools lift kids’ achievement and whether test scores translate into later-life success. A longtime fellow of the conservative Hoover Institution, he won for Education Research in 2021, which brought a $3.9 million award for new projects. He is also deeply involved in some of the biggest ongoing debates in education policy, including whether the achievement gap between rich and poor students .

Above all other issues, Hanushek is tied to the question of whether spending more on schools will consistently result in better student outcomes. He has been both resolutely skeptical of the proposition and influential in the statehouses and courtrooms deciding whether to increase education funding. Over the last decade, a raft of studies have offered new evidence that increasing expenditures on schooling does, in fact, lift achievement — a in a lengthy review released this spring, while still insisting that the amount of dollars expended matter far less than the quality of the interventions they underwrite.

Money is also at the center of what the veteran researcher calls his “simple and complete” fix for COVID-related learning setbacks, detailed in . But rather than paying to lengthen school days or fund tutoring programs, Hanushek advises that districts spend remaining pandemic relief aid on incentives for the best teachers to take on extra students; he also proposes buying out the contracts of their least effective colleagues. 

In a conversation with The 74’s Kevin Mahnken, Hanushek talked about how the most advanced economies reward skill (and punish the lack of it), why he believes voluntary learning initiatives tend to increase achievement gaps and what the United States could do with $28 trillion.

“The cohort that suffered these learning losses isn’t going to be around for much longer,” he said. “We’re graduating 3.5 million of them each year, and they’re going away without any real chance of recovery.”

This conversation was edited for length and clarity.

Can you contextualize actually means? It’s a sum so large as to be almost mystical.

Sure. You know that we had a recession because of the pandemic, when businesses closed. The total cost of that is about 1/15th the same amount, maybe $2 trillion. The best estimates I’ve seen of the effects of the 2008 recession are something like $5 trillion. And if you want a third option, $28 trillion is a little more than one year of America’s GDP. So it’s as if you closed down the economy for a whole year. 

Am I right in thinking about this as essentially a huge number of deferred opportunities for growth, like businesses that don’t expand or innovations that are slower to arrive?

It’s everything about the economy. But a better way to think about it for most people is that everybody who was in school during the pandemic will experience 5–6 percent lower lifetime earnings. It’s almost like a 5 or 6 percent added tax, with this cohort earning less than the cohorts immediately ahead of it and immediately behind it, because they’re just less skilled. Unless we do something about it. 

But how confident are we that these test results are really measuring skills that are important in later life? Do we have proof that there’s an actual relationship between student scores on NAEP or state exams scores and their future economic activity?

Historically, people haven’t looked so much at the effect of test scores or cognitive skills on earnings because we just haven’t had much data. We’ve [Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development], and it shows that the U.S. rewards economic skills more than almost any other country on earth.

But consider that in reverse. It also means that the U.S. punishes the lack of skills more than almost any other country on earth. What this is essentially showing is that employers really do pay attention to the skills people have. Those skills determine how well people can adapt to new jobs, and they help determine how capable people are in actually doing their jobs. Nobody objects to the idea that people who are smarter generally earn more. And while there is a lot of variation around that — from NBA players, who often don’t finish their degrees, to college graduates who find themselves driving taxis — that’s the kind of relationship we would expect to see.

Is that connection between demonstrated academic achievement and economic success just a result of the highly knowledge-based economies that prevail in rich, Western countries like the U.S.?

Precisely. One country is Singapore, and Singapore basically doesn’t do anything except for knowledge-based industries.

If it’s so clear that increased educational attainment is linked to better economic prospects, does it worry you that we’ve seen the last few years?

We don’t know if that’s going to last. But in the short run, it’s a potential concern that people aren’t going off to get more skills. Part of it is that in the current economy, it looks like you can get a huge reward from going straight into the labor market after high school. But it just won’t compare with the reward from going to college.

There are variations in the returns [to college]. You can go into some college programs that ultimately don’t pay off, at least if you pay the full tuition. But on average, college graduates are earning something like 75 percent more than high school graduates, and that differential is large enough that people who get fixated on the cost of tuition and debt cost are really making a huge mistake if they don’t go to college. The differential more than compensates for the cost of getting that college degree.

Could you please explain the “simple and complete” way of addressing learning loss?

Every time I mention my preferred strategy, people sort of turn away. [Laughs] People are much happier saying, “Let’s do exactly what we’re doing already, but just a little bit more of it.” And it boils down to lengthening the school day, lengthening the school year, trying some tutoring here and there. But even if you could implement that — which nobody knows how to do — the data suggests that it wouldn’t make up for the kinds of losses that kids have suffered. It’s just not a strong enough treatment.

Something everyone mostly agrees with is that teachers are really important, and that effective teachers are very, very valuable. People start to disagree when you ask, “What do you make of that?” My answer for dealing with the current learning losses of the COVID cohort is to try to get our most effective teachers to just work more intensively by taking on a few more kids. You can, in fact, provide incentives from the existing ESSER money — which will be around for at least another year — and provide them with help in grading, essentially lighten the load and make it possible for them to teach more kids.

The place where everybody stops listening is here: We know that our most ineffective teachers are just harming kids. If we could take some of the ESSER money and buy out the contracts of our least effective teachers, the combination of those things could be enough to make up for the learning loss we’ve seen. 

We’re almost completely back to normal schooling. But the cohort that suffered these learning losses isn’t going to be around for much longer; we’re graduating 3.5 million of them each year, and they’re going away without any real chance of recovery. So we have to do something that’s quick — we can’t wait to hire and train a new group of teachers, or wait to figure out which kinds of instruction might help them the most. We just don’t have the time. But my point is that our current workforce is good enough to make up for this! We have, on average, a really good teaching force, though we don’t use the most effective teachers enough, and we overuse the least effective teachers.

The issue of urgency is obviously critical, but I wonder if it really supports your point. Given the logistical and political difficulties of that kind of approach, it seems much simpler to increase the quantity of instruction students receive — by providing tutoring and lengthening the school year, for instance — than by improving the quality through the strategy you describe.

The problem is that nobody is willing to actually make it mandatory that people stay longer in school. Los Angeles had a voluntary program to try to add four days to the school year, and . But even if they did, what would it mean? Say a quarter of your kids actually show up for two extra days: What do you teach them, and how do you integrate that with their normal classroom instruction? You could, at best, improve their soccer skills. 

Voluntary added days generally expand variation in academic performance because the kids who need [extra schooling] the least are the ones who tend to show up for voluntary learning days. It’s people at the top of the academic scale who take advantage of voluntary activities, and the people at the bottom don’t. That’s why I said before that we don’t know how to implement things like tutoring and supplemental instruction at scale. We have a few examples of it working, but we don’t know how to put it into 100,000 schools.

Does it surprise you that, in the five years since the Janus ruling, the organizing strength of teachers’ unions seems to have risen in much of the country? Teacher pay became something of a national issue during the summer of 2018, and now you see Republican governors excited to announce pay raises.

It’s a huge obstacle that you can’t get schools and teachers’ unions to agree to anything. We have a strike going on in Oakland Public Schools, where the union is trying to wring the last bit of money out of the pandemic; they’ve been offered over 20 percent pay increases over three years, but they don’t think that’s enough. [After nearly two weeks of school closures, on May 16.]

One of my favorite books on my bookshelf is called . It has a 1962 copyright. The thesis of the book is basically that if you pay all teachers the same amount, you’re likely to get either very underpaid math teachers or very overpaid PE teachers; you tend to see the former, and that’s where some teacher shortages come from. It’s a problem that certainly exists, and in my opinion, the biggest shortage is a shortage of highly effective teachers that we would like to keep in.

Do you think there’s something positive in the settlement we’ve reached in the U.S., wherein we hire lots of teachers but have largely deferred salary increases? I’m reminded of written by your frequent collaborator, Ludger Woessmann, which found that students earn better grades and stay in school longer when they have an adult mentor in school — that seems like something that small class sizes would foster, no?

It can be very important to build close relationships [between students and teachers]. The problem is that everything we measure suggests that reducing class size is not the most important thing, and that having an effective teacher in a classroom is so much more important than having a slightly smaller class. 

People get excited if they can see anything positive in the data about smaller classes. But the impact is so small relative to the impact that great teachers have. As you mentioned, teachers are now concerned about low salaries. But has to do with hiring more people too; it’s just hiring more people and paying them more. There are demands for more ancillary people in schools, like counselors and nurses, and they want to put caps on class size as well. So no one’s given up on quantity, which is the thing that unions like. Unions make their money by having more people, so they’re always happy to push for smaller class sizes.

If I could change the subject slightly: We’ve , which radically changed the way it evaluates and pays teachers. It’s much more related to effectiveness in the classroom now than under the traditional salary schedule. The other thing they did was introduce an incentive scheme to get the best teachers, measured by prior performance, to work in the lowest-performing schools in Dallas.

We found two things from this experiment. One is that the most effective teachers were willing to do that for relatively modest average salaries. The second was that once they moved to the lowest-performing schools, the worst schools in Dallas began approaching the citywide average within two years. This is a policy that has been shown to work, and work at scale where you can turn around entire schools.

But the unfortunate thing they did was say, “Oops! Now that these schools are performing well, they aren’t eligible for the program anymore.” They took the incentives away, and the best teachers left because there are lots of easier places to work. And they will if they don’t get paid.

You’ve got on Dallas’s pay-for-performance reform. It reminded me of the debate over Washington, D.C.’s IMPACT teacher evaluation system, which people have said is really hard to replicate, in part because was so fierce.

There was a bit of blowback in Dallas as well. Mike Miles was the superintendent who devised the entire Dallas system, and a somewhat grumpy school board to put it in place. Then, just as it was starting to come together, he left. So there’s no doubt, this is politically difficult.

The question is, are you willing to give up $28 trillion and settle for having the 31st-ranked school system in the world because it’s politically difficult? I’m not somebody who needs to make my living by politics. But it’s clear that the rewards of adopting these policies are so, so large, even if there are also political costs. Someday I hope the teachers’ unions also see that it’s in their interest to make some marginal changes to the old “no differentiation” policy.

I realize that’s just your estimate, and it’s not as though it would be dropped as a lump sum in the national checking account; but if the value of restoring lost learning is anything approaching $28 trillion, it could fund all our K–12 schools many times over.

The cost of the current U.S. education system is about $750 billion, so you’re talking about potentially funding that system for decades with the money that you could get out of this. Frankly, we have to get some people who are willing to lead in this time of crisis.

Are there any useful lessons from the catastrophe of the pandemic — or perhaps technology, including advances in virtual and asynchronous learning — that we might use to improve schools going forward?

The thing I learned was sort of the opposite. 

It became very clear that having a teacher in the classroom is much better than hybrid instruction that only sometimes has a live, in-person teacher. And hybrid instruction, in turn, is better than fully remote instruction. There’s noy doubt that we gained a greater appreciation of the importance of the classroom teacher, even in these kinds of chaotic circumstances. We had other ways of trying to teach, but we couldn’t do away with effective classroom teachers. 

We did mobilize the tech industry to try to improve virtual instruction in a variety of ways, and maybe we’ll come out a bit ahead from that. But I worry that we won’t try to learn from when and where virtual instruction works best, and when and where it doesn’t work. 

Do you think the public sector, including federal entities like the Institute of Education Sciences, needs to take a more active role as a catalyst for breakthrough learning platforms and technology? Given the mixed record of ed-tech generally, I wonder if we actually have reason to be hopeful.

Sure, I like what IES has been doing. The amount of money we’re talking about there is pathetic, really, compared with the size of the problem. We have systematically underplayed any role of research and evaluation in education compared with other industries. But education is the base industry for most of this other stuff that we’re pouring money into.

The most recent NAEP release shows decades’ worth of progress — this time in civics and U.S. history — essentially erased since the beginning of the pandemic. I’m wondering whether you think the gains of the last 25 years or so, often characterized as the “education reform era,” were all that big to begin with.

Reform has been less reformist than many of us would have liked. It hasn’t accomplished what we wanted.

On the latest NAEP release, the thing that I thought was most important is that we really expanded the gaps in scoring. The top end of the scoring distribution did okay in social studies, but the lower-performing students fell further. What we’re seeing just reinforced these gaps, the spread-out distribution. At the bottom end, it seems that some eighth graders don’t even know what the separate branches of government do; they barely know the difference between the legislature and the executive. That’s very worrisome to me because the U.S. has thrived by having a common society. We might be losing some of that, and the polarization we see in our politics can only be heightened by these kinds of results.

The expanding achievement gap, which we’ve seen on other NAEP tests, is really concerning. Forty percent of eighth-graders scored below the NAEP Basic level in U.S. history, for example.

Yeah, and NAEP Basic is really basic. On subject-matter tests like these, kids scoring below that level really don’t know much at all; on math and reading tests, they’re kind of hopeless because they are not likely to be able to go on past eighth-grade knowledge. In the math test, it’s also roughly 40 percent of eighth-graders in the country scoring below Basic. That’s not a position you want to be in.

There’s been an enormous amount of newer research from scholars like and on the effects of education funding on school outcomes, with much of it suggesting that money really does matter. As perhaps the single figure most associated with the opposing view, are you getting ready to wave the white flag?

You get very different effects across these studies, and it’s not well understood when money has a big effect and when it doesn’t. There’s no reason to infer from some of this recent work that we can be assured of a great achievement gain, or a lifetime earnings gain, by simply putting more money into the existing system.

At a certain level, this is largely a political debate because Kirabo Jackson and Jesse Rothstein recognize that how you spend money is also really important. My view is that how you spend money is considerably more important than how much you spend. We’re currently spending something like $17,000 per kid on education, and an extra $300 is not going to make much difference unless you spend that money well. 

I’m reminded of that argued that the positive effects of school finance reforms are mostly driven by states that also adopted test-based accountability.

Yeah, it was very simple and straightforward that if you put more money into systems with good accountability for outcomes, you get much larger results. Part of the problem is that the current federal accountability law, ESSA, is loosening accountability all over the place and . What states have done since 2016 is backing off holding teachers responsible for student outcomes. This has negative effects on learning. 

The effects of spending have been argued endlessly over the last few decades. What are the biggest questions you’d like to see investigated going forward?

One of the developments coming out of the pandemic is that schooling is going to start becoming very different. It’s clear to me that just doing what’s called homeschooling is not going to be the answer, but parents have often looked for something different than what they got during the pandemic and even before the pandemic. You have lots of political fighting over education savings accounts and choice.

I don’t think any of these things is going to be the answer, but understanding the possible choices is important because choices are going to expand for lots of people. We don’t understand where they’re going to go and what the effects of those choices are going to be. 

If states continue to expand school choice, does it become harder to improve policy through the districts? It seems like the lever of traditional public schooling will just move fewer students in the future.

Well, if we had everywhere, we’d still see 80 percent of kids enrolled in traditional public schools. I like having more choice, and I think it’s important. It’s important to improve the charter sector as well. But the traditional public schools are still going to be there for the rest of my lifetime, and probably yours too. So we still have to be concerned about how we operate traditional public schools because they’re the backbone of our economy.