Source: Education Week
If American taxpayers were to fork out a couple billion more on top of the $650 billion they annually spend on public schools, would academic outcomes improve? More money does, in fact, make a difference, a growing number of researchers say—provided that you spend enough, and in the right manner. They point to research in the past five years that provides examples of instances where politicians and taxpayers invested more money in teacher salaries, school construction, and schools with high populations of low-income students and saw students’ test scores jump. “It’s not that resources don’t matter and that they can’t matter,” Eric A. Hanushek, a nationally known economist and fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University said. “It’s that you can’t trust that you can just drop in a pile of money and expect good performance to come out. That doesn’t mean you should cut spending on schools. I think that there’s still a case to be made on targeting extra resources on schools to get better performance.”