Analysts beyond counting, beginning with the late, great James Coleman, have shown beyond peradventure that increased spending on education is not related to increases in student achievement. Yet the conventional wisdom still resists that powerful insight. An editorial in last Friday's Wall Street Journal tried again, this time drawing on spending statistics recently released in a report by the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute for Government and student achievement data released by the National Center for Education Statistics. According to the Journal's analysis, despite the fact that real education spending (adjusted for inflation and enrollment) between 1997 and 2002 rose 17 percent, there was "virtually no link between spending and performance" when the per-state spending increases were cross-referenced with National Assessment of Educational Progress reading scores. As the Journal notes, the one question no one addresses this campaign season - or any - is this: "Is there any other part of American life that would receive tens of billions of more dollars if it kept showing no improvement in performance?"
"What money can't buy," Wall Street Journal, July 30, 2004 (subscription required)
K-12 Education, Still Growing Strongly, Donald J. Boyd, The Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government, June 2004