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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   28936 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023

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Is Education Spending Progressive?

This is mostly a specific data question. Brookings Institute reports that education spending is ever so slightly higher in poor districts than non-poor districts; this paper by two Stanford Professors seems to find the same thing; the Urban Institute (with one of the same authors from the Brookings report) seems to show that on the state level funding is frequently progressive. I’m not doing full justice here to these papers, which are more nuanced and actually argue that funding to poor districts is still frequently lacking. This makes sense to me - it stands to reason if you spend basically the same on rich students and poor students the former will still do better based on all their other advantages. But I’m more wondering about the empirical claim itself because the Economic Policy Institute finds the exact opposite results. They agree using national averages school spending is a little progressive, but find that when you break things up at the district level wealthier districts receive more funding.

The funny thing here is that they’re using the same data source as the other papers: the Department of Education’s Digest of Education Statistics / National Center for Education Statistics 2017–2018 Local Education Agency Finance Survey. But when EPI looks at it they find:

While state revenues are a significant portion of funding, they only modestly counter the large locally based inequities. And while federal funding, by far the smallest source of revenue, is being deployed as intended (to reduce inequities), it inevitably falls short of compensating for a system grounded in highly inequitable local revenues as its principal source of funding. As such, although states provide their highest-poverty districts with $1,550 more per student than to their lowest-poverty districts, and federal sources provide their highest-poverty districts with $2,080 more per student than to their lowest-poverty districts, states and the federal government jointly compensate for only about half of the revenue gap for high-poverty districts (which receive a per-student average of $6,330 less in property tax and other local revenues). That large gap in local funding leaves the highest-poverty districts still $2,710 short per student relative to the lowest-poverty districts, reflecting the 14.1% revenue gap shown in Figure C. Even though high-poverty districts get more in federal and state dollars, they get so much less in property taxes that it still puts them in the negative category overall.

And when the Stanford guys look at it they find:

Poor spending exceeds nonpoor spending in 56 percent of districts; 63 percent of the FRPL population attend schools in these districts. Black spending exceeds white spending in 71 percent of districts; 70 percent of black students attend schools in these districts. Hispanic spending exceeds white spending in 60 percent of districts; 61 percent of Hispanic students attend schools in these districts. Overall, larger districts (by enrollment) also tend to be those that spend more on disadvantaged students; therefore, more disadvantaged students are concentrated in districts with greater inequality.

What gives? Am I misunderstanding and they’re actually measuring different things that cause their results to be different?

This makes sense to me - it stands to reason if you spend basically the same on rich students and poor students the former will still do better based on all their other advantages

I'm sure everyone here knows this already, but - the 'other advantages' (for educational attainment) are mostly genes. Social assistance, modern food production and medicine, and universal schooling are very good at smoothing over the differences that social class and wealth caused in the past. And schools are amazing at identifying talented students, and the modern economy's somewhat good at sorting more talented students into higher incomes. And the heritability of educational attainment is pretty high (~ >2/3), so a lot of richer students just have better genes. The impact of 'shared environment' (i.e. anything related to parents) is much lower (10%). Science is hard, those numbers are probably off a bit, but they match with my experience.

Another argument some would make is 'if local voters want to spend more of their money on their childrens' education - shouldn't they be able to? must we prevent them from doing so with more taxes and redistribution?', but I think this unnecessarily argues both property rights / local control and optimal policy.

There are also clearly issues in low-income schools with teaching quality and disruptive students that hurt learning quality at least a little bit. (how much is a little bit? this would probably be non-shared environment, which is <=25%, and all randomness and idiosyncratic genetic effects also is part of non-shard environment, so there's not that much room left). But 5% more money can only increase teacher salaries by a little over 5%, and won't solve disruption.

FdB and the lesswrong embryo guy should collaborate to write an essay on the cost effectiveness of education policy vs embryo selection to improve test scores and other outcomes, I wonder how many orders of magnitude the difference would be. 2? 5?

Another argument some would make is 'if local voters want to spend more of their money on their childrens' education - shouldn't they be able to? must we prevent them from doing so with more taxes and redistribution?', but I think this unnecessarily argues both property rights / local control and optimal policy.

This was the main angle I was intending to take. I probably agree that state-level policies should provide for sufficient funds for all schools to meet some minimal standard, but I cannot see any moral case for insisting that all schools must receive the same funding above that threshold. If a wealthy community wants to build an unusually nice football stadium for their kids, I don't see the sin in that and I don't see the obligation to redistribute an exactly equal amount of funding to schools in poorer communities. I really can't relate to the egalitarian impulse to make everything equally mediocre everywhere.

I cannot see any moral case for insisting that all schools must receive the same funding above that threshold

If we lived in a society where antibiotics and clean water were restricted to the rich, and the rich and poor were much less sorted by IQ than they are, there's a strong argument that money is better spent giving poor communities basic medical care, sanitation, and nutrition than it is improving the athletic facilities at rich schools, even if the tax burden is onerous - and this'd be economically beneficial for everyone in the long term. Although that'd look less like redistribution and more like 'development', if higher taxes on the rich was the best way to accomplish it (which it might not be), I'd support that. But that's not where we are now. It is where people sort of imagine / hallucinate that we are, though, which is why I don't like making that argument

I don’t see funding itself as either progressive or regressive. The issue is whether the funds go to effective education, which I would argue is the untrue part. The funds don’t go to education as often as they go to prestige projects, compliance issues, and administrative salaries. Add in the educational fads, which often don’t work, especially for kids who aren’t able to teach themselves despite them, time wasted on fluff units that teach useless stuff or outright propaganda, and you’re spending lots of money for at best useless and at worst counterproductive stuff. The worst paid bits of education are the teachers and those parts of the curriculum that aren’t interesting to the administration that run the schools. If you’re spending 3/4 of your funds to make sure Johnny knows all about gender queer pronouns and 1/4 on reading, math, and science, especially if kids come from worse off backgrounds, you’re actually creating a regressive system because poor kids don’t have the resources to pick up the slack of what schools can’t or don’t bother to teach.

The issue is whether the funds go to effective education, which I would argue is the untrue part. The funds don’t go to education as often as they go to prestige projects, compliance issues, and administrative salaries.

It's a separate question but agreed on administrative bloat. Add in the fact that when schools underperform some states have requirements for them to hire new people to create performance plans, or fill out additional compliance paperwork, making their bureaucratic costs go up and their dollar spent per student go down when they need that money to count.

I haven't looked in to these cases to be sure but your description of things sounds like an almost textbook example of Simpson's paradox.

The left has a metaphysics based on humans being free floating blank slate soul that happened to be born as whatever they are. The highest heresy in left wing ideology is constraining the soul/mind by physical reality. Having randomly ended up in the wrong body shouldn't impact the soul according to their thinking. Therefore, it is expected that those on the left would be all for education. If we are blank slates tossed into a body randomly then anyone can become anything given the right circumstances.

The fundamental debate between left and right is essentialism vs existentialism.

Part of the answer is probably "The South". If you look in any given area, you'll probably find the poor districts are funded as well or better than the rich ones. But there's more poverty in some areas/states and those areas will have less funding for both rich and poor districts, in part because the cost of providing education there is cheaper. Brookings actually adjusts for this, though they claim the adjustment doesn't affect their conclusions. The other part is likely different ways of choosing poor districts.

Its also cost of living/teacher salaries reflecting COL. Teachers in Des Moines, Iowa aren't demonstrably worse, or materially worse off than teachers in Chicago, IL, but they are paid much less. And their house costs much less. And their food costs less. And their childcare costs less.

Thanks, that makes sense.

Does it even matter? Every bit of information I've looked at in terms of spending vs. academic achievement shows basically no correlation, and sometimes a very weak inverse correlation. Utah, Colorado, and Iowa spend close to the lowest amount per student on education, but consistently rank in the top 10 for academic achievement. Arizona spends slightly more than Utah, and New York spends the most of any state, but both of them are ranked below the median (New York well below), while New Jersey has very high spend and ranks in the top 10 for achievement. Arguments about disparate spend amounts based on property taxes beg the question.

Arizona spends slightly more than Utah, and New York spends the most of any state, but both of them are ranked below the median (New York well below), while New Jersey has very high spend and ranks in the top 10 for achievement.

Differences in education funding are overwhelmingly because of teacher salaries. Teachers in poor midwestern states with some of the lowest per-capita spend might be paid like $40k, whereas an identical teacher in the NYC public school system might be paid $100k. The very highest-paid public school teachers are invariably found in rich suburbs (Greenwich, Palo Alto/SV in general, Westchester, and affluent New England in general). In part this is because teachers don't want a 90 minute commute and do want to be able to afford a home. There are also some outliers in places where it's hard to recruit teachers, like Alaska.

Education spend therefore definitionally has pretty much zero effect on outcomes, because there's no magical means by which cost-of-living based salary differentials for teachers impact student results, or even educational quality in any sense. The NYC teacher isn't rich, adjusted for cost of living they live similarly to their Iowa equivalent, they just live in a more expensive place.

I think states are large enough as units they might not be helpful, especially since spending is going to differ based on how wealthy the states are; though I glanced through state level stuff just now and found correlations between higher spending and better results, here's California and Texas. The EPI piece at least is based off the Department of Education's National Education Cost Model, which estimates dollars per pupil necessary to reach adequate test scores. I don't really grok the model but the estimated numbers aren't much higher than what's actually spent so aren't calling for radical overhaul or anything.

Sure, and the catholic school system spends like 30% of the public school system on average and gets better results than anyone.

This makes sense to me - it stands to reason if you spend basically the same on rich students and poor students the former will still do better based on all their other advantages.

I can’t imagine the spending disparity at which that wouldn’t be the case or the upper/middle classes ever allowing us to actually approach it. I maintain the state is an ersatz parent at best and that arguing over the exact allocation of property taxes is barking up the wrong tree.

I have no idea what if anything would actually make poor and rich students equal, but here at least they'ree suggesting a more modest metric of hitting "funding required for adequate test scores," as estimated by the the Department of Education's National Education Cost Model.

Medium- and high-poverty districts are spending, respectively, $700 and $3,078 per student less than what would be required. For the highest-poverty districts, that gap is $5,135, meaning districts there are spending about 30% less than what would be required to deliver an adequate level of education to their students. (Conversely, the two low-poverty quintiles are spending more than they need to reach that benchmark, another indication that funds are being poorly allocated.)

I don't understand the cost model well enough to know if it makes sense or not.

The "adequacy" metric -- the National Education Cost Model -- should be regarded as political and useless. It assumes it costs more to teach poor kids to the same level, so if you have two adjacent districts with the same per-pupil funding, one rich and one poor, the poor one might be regarded as having "inadequate" funding and the rich one as having more than "adequate" funding.

Umm, why shouldn't we assume it costs more to teach poor kids than rich ones? That seems self-evident if you don't assume poor kids are just as smart as white kids.

If you assume it, you cannot legitimately say that your study demonstrates that you need more money to educate the poor people -- you're just pulling your own assumptions out.

Because there are absolute mountains of evidence that some kids you can't teach at all at any observed price. By assuming that it "costs more", you're ignoring that evidence to frame the problem as a fiscal one, which it is not. Demonstrate that you actually can teach these kids, and what the price is, and then we can talk about whether it's worth it. In the meantime, anyone claiming that the problem is money should be presumed to be a filthy liar.

To be clear, I think we should impose a 25% budget cut on every school district in America, then hang an administrator from each every month until results improve. Then we should repeat the process. Money isn't the problem, and that would be true even if administrators weren't embezzling it- schools have enough.

But all else being equal, you would expect a population with an average IQ of 110 to be much cheaper to educate to the same level than a population with an average IQ of 95, which in turn costs less to educate than a population with an average IQ of 85. Yes, there's lots of kids in the last who are incapable of learning algebra, but even the ones who are capable of it are probably going to cost more to educate because it takes more time. And I don't think that schools having more money than they actually need in all three scenarios changes the fundamental calculus of "it costs more to teach kids that have more trouble learning".

Why would be that be useless? That seems obviously true to me. Put a fast person and a slow person and the same starting line and you expect the fast person to always pull ahead. Per their calculations, it takes more funding to get a poor kid to baseline than a rich kid, which is what you'd expect.

Still, the EPI paper doesn't say the districts are funded the same but the poor districts lose out only on adequacy, they say poorer districts are lower funded in absolute terms as well.

Per their calculations, it takes more funding to get a poor kid to baseline than a rich kid, which is what you'd expect.

That's not a calculation, that's an assumption.

The core purpose of the NECM is to account for the fact, long established in the research literature, that the cost of providing a given level of education is not uniform across districts (Duncombe and Yinger 2007). Perhaps most importantly, districts that serve larger shares of high-need students (e.g., higher Census child poverty rates) will have higher costs. In addition, other factors, such as labor costs (e.g., districts in areas with higher costs of living will need to pay their employees more), size (economies of scale), and population density, all affect the “value of the education dollar.” The model, therefore, first estimates the relationships between district spending and these important factors, including testing outcomes. Importantly, the model accounts for the fact that school funding both affects and is affected by testing outcomes (For example, a district with higher test scores will tend to have higher property values than a district with lower scores. This high valuation allows the former district to collect more property tax revenues, which, in turn, boosts spending and positively affects testing outcomes. The NECM uses econometric methods to account for this endogeneity and tease out the causal relationship between spending and outcomes.)

This initial model yields a kind of “relationship inventory” of how each factor is related to spending. We then use the “inventory” to predict the cost (spending levels) of achieving a common outcome level (e.g., national average math and reading test scores) for each individual district, based on that district’s configuration of characteristics (in a sense, by comparing each district to other similar districts). These “required spending” estimates can then be compared with actual spending levels (total spending, direct to elementary and secondary education) in each district (this same basic process also yields our state-level estimates, which are aggregated district-level estimates). The difference between actual and required spending is a measure of adequacy relative to the common goal of national average scores.

The core purpose of the NECM is to account for the fact, long established in the research literature, that the cost of providing a given level of education is not uniform across districts (Duncombe and Yinger 2007).

Note that Duncombe and Yinger 2007 was about reducing costs through consolidation.

Perhaps most importantly, districts that serve larger shares of high-need students (e.g., higher Census child poverty rates) will have higher costs.

The buried assumption here is that putting more money into schools with larger shares of poor students will improve their education. But that's exactly what we were trying to determine! This is circular.

The buried assumption here is that putting more money into schools with larger shares of poor students will improve their education. But that's exactly what we were trying to determine! This is circular.

I think you're imagining researchers comparing a poor neighborhood to a rich neighborhood and assuming the difference in outcomes is down to funding. They're not, they're comparing poor neighborhoods and finding that the stand out difference between them (after controlling for income, cost of living, demographics, population density) is the better performing poor school has more funding per student. This is a reasonable conclusion. I'm sure there are counterarguments or complaints to be made about their data or something but no one here is providing them

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The core purpose of the NECM is to account for the fact, long established in the research literature, that the cost of providing a given level of education is not uniform across districts (Duncombe and Yinger 2007).

They cannot actually demonstrate that a "given level of education" can be provided at any cost, at least for levels of education that are not bottom-percentile.

Perhaps most importantly, districts that serve larger shares of high-need students (e.g., higher Census child poverty rates) will have higher costs.

...And will demonstrate minimal or no gain in outcomes, despite these higher costs.

Their entire logic rests on the assumption that the higher spending is causing higher test scores. That isn't actually true, and so everything they base that assumption on is garbage-in, garbage out.

I'm willing to endorse any level of educational spending for one of these low-outcome schools, provided that the educators are volunteers, and that failure to educate means the people doing the educating and their supporters are personally on the hook for every single thin dime spent on the failure. They cannot do the job. They either know they cannot do the job, or they are so incompetent and deluded that they cannot be trusted with any level of responsability. Their entire system is built around lying about the undeniable facts that have accrued through fifty years of nation-wide policy.

Their entire logic rests on the assumption that the higher spending is causing higher test scores.

If they're taking two neighborhoods and controlling for income, cost of living, demographics, population, pop density, and so on, and find that the difference in the better performing school is more funding per student, this is a reasonable argument to make. As far as I can tell you haven't made a counterargument here. If anyone has any actual objections with the adequacy model they're welcome to raise it, but the entire thing is besides the point because, again, the EPI paper isn't saying "funding is equal but they should be given more for the adequacy score," they're saying "poor districts are funded worse, period." It's also besides the point because my OP isn't some philosophical argument about who deserves what or what's the best way to fund schools; I'm asking a pretty specific question about how these two different think tanks found different conclusions from the same data.

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