As if in answer to the education critics who always simply say "you can't just throw money at the problem" but never have any idea themselves how to better the situation, comes a new study of rural schools in Oregon.
Preliminary results of this study by Jerry Johnson of Ohio University were published in the Portland Oregonian and the Roseburg News-Review. The full study is slated for publication by The Rural School and Community Trust later this spring.
Oregon was chosen for the study because the funding of its rural schools varies widely, more so than most other states, so the results would be clearer.
It seems that levels of school funding make a bigger difference than other factors. More below
Besides school funding levels, three other factors were studied: the fraction of teachers who were fully credentialed, the poverty rate of the community, and the educational background of the community. All four of these factors affected the educational outcome, but the amount of money was clearly more decisive than other factors, followed by the fraction of teachers who were fully credentialed.
From the Oregonian article:
Researcher Jerry Johnson, an Ohio University education professor, said money had the highest correlation of four factors that showed an influence on student achievement. He was surprised at how clearly money stood out as a factor -- usually that's hard to see in academic studies, he said.
These results are no surprise to me. I was teaching in California during the 1980's when Bill Honig was the state superintendent of instruction. Whatever else you can say about him (he was, to my mind, basically done in by his political enemies), he brought ever more money to the schools for each year he was in office. I also remember that each of those years showed a concommitant increase in standardized test scores. I guess, despite the opinions of "some people" (to borrow a rhetorical technique from Fox News) school boards and teachers really can spend additional monies wisely and produce results.
Now, this study is limited to rural schools, so your mileage may vary with schools in other settings, at least as far as the relative amount that the four factors affect results. Still, it's a study that deserves wider recognition if only for its clarity. Meanwhile the NCLB act is not only underfunded, but structured to drain monies from "failing schools" and then eventually from successful schools as the students in "failing schools" leave those schools and flood into the more successful ones.
Yes, the NCLB act is working exactly as designed,as this quote from an article on the NEA web site shows(AYP means "adequate yearly progress"):
In a majority of the states reporting information on school districts, the percentage of school districts not meeting AYP is higher than the percentage of schools not meeting AYP. States falling in this category are: Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Illinois, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia, Washington, and West Virginia. School districts that fail to make AYP for two or more consecutive years are also subject to NCLB sanctions.
Anyway, this diary is long enough. I do want to give credit to Thom Hartmann, whose daily radio show led me to these articles. I searched Daily Kos to see if anyone else had diaried them, but did not find any, but it's an important bit of evidence so I felt it must be diaried.