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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   28981 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023

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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

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.

The methodology is here I don't think that's what they're doing. And the numbers they come out with are large enough that I don't think they could possibly be doing that, because no high-poverty district would be "adequately funded" by their measures. They determine that the cost difference between a 100% poverty district and a 0% poverty district is, in their preferred model, $41,000 per pupil.

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).

Per their own words, the 41k number is using the most aggressive model they designed. The very next sentence says their alternative model cuts that almost in half to $26,000. Even still those reflect extreme hypotheticals parameters of 0% poverty and 100% poverty that we don't see in the real world. Again in the same paragraph:

the practical range of child poverty is from near 0% to between 40 and 50%, so the differences in costs per pupil from the actual lowest to highest poverty districts are only about half the estimated range. And, the two models are not strikingly different. For high poverty districts, the more aggressive model (which has more desirable statistical properties) leads to per pupil cost estimates that are about $5,000 per pupil higher in the highest poverty districts (or about 20% higher).

The numbers you get when looking at actual poverty ratios are below, from the EPI paper:

Highest Poverty (poorest)

Actual Spending: $13,093

Required Spending: $18,231

High Poverty

Actual Spending: $10,850

Required Spending: $13,928

Medium Poverty

Actual Spending: $10,499

Required Spending: $11,199

Low Poverty

Actual Spending: $10,532

Required Spending: $9917

Lowest Poverty (Affluent)

Actual Spending: $10,239

Required Spending: $8313

The difference in required spending between the lowest and highest poverty districts is more than half again still, less than 10k. And the amount required to raise the highest poverty districts to hit their required threshold is half again yet again, only 5k, or 1/8th the most extreme hypothetical estimate.

As I've said several times though, I don't really care. I'm just trying to figure out how they got different results from the same data set.

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