Buy the Book? Evidence on the Effect of Textbook Funding on School-Level Achievement

Holden, Kristian L.

doi:10.1257/app.20150112

Cited by 14 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 31 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Some of the credible studies have been based on quirks in the school finance formulas that generate discontinuities in policies that can be exploited. One of the clearest examples of these studies was described by Holden (2016). That study explored the effects of a one-time payment of $96.90 per student for textbooks, which was available if the students' school fell below a predetermined threshold of academic performance.…”

Section: Textbook Spendingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Does school spending matter? The new literature on an old question.

Jackson¹

2020

Confronting Inequality: How Policies and Practices Shape Children's Opportunities.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

T here has been a long-standing debate regarding whether increasing the financial resources available to public schools can improve child outcomes in general and low-income children's outcomes in particular. Shedding light on this issue, in 1966, James Coleman and coauthors conducted the first large-scale U.S. study to link student achievement outcomes to family background and school characteristics. The report used data from a cross section of students in 1965 and examined the cross-sectional relationship (i.e., at a given point in time) between school spending, family background, and test scores. The report concluded that "it is known that socioeconomic factors bear a strong relation to academic achievement. When these factors are statistically controlled, however, it appears that differences between schools account for only a small fraction of differences in pupil achievement" (Coleman et al., 1966, pp. 21-22). Since Coleman et al. (1966), many social scientists have estimated the relationship between school spending and student outcomes in order to better ascertain whether increased financial resources for public schools improve child outcomes. THE OLD LITERATUREPrior to 1995, all U.S.-based studies relating student outcomes to measures of per-pupil spending were observational (i.e., correlational) in nature. These studies either (a) estimated the relationship between school spending and

show abstract

Section: Textbook Spendingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Does school spending matter? The new literature on an old question.

Jackson¹

2020

Confronting Inequality: How Policies and Practices Shape Children's Opportunities.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…2 Still, small differences between schools in test scores are almost surely not indicative of true underlying differences in school quality (Kane and Staiger 2002). In fact, the issues with uncertainty around small differences are so well established among researchers that a common research design for causal inference is to compare outcomes for schools just above and below an arbitrarily set cut point, on the argument that they are essentially equivalent, except for the random chance of which side of the cut they ended up on (e.g., Rockoff and Turner 2010;Rouse et al 2013;Holden 2016). Yet the categorizations of schools affect how literally billions of dollars of education funding are allocated.…”

Section: The Use and Nonuse Of Statistical Significance In Policy Makingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Appropriate Standards of Evidence for Education Policy Decision Making

Conaway

Goldhaber

2020

Education Finance and Policy

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Education policy makers must make decisions under uncertainty. Thus, how they think about risks has important implications for resource allocation, interventions, innovation, and the information that is provided to the public. In this policy brief we illustrate how the standard of evidence for making decisions can be quite inconsistently applied, in part because of how research findings are reported and contextualized. We argue that inconsistencies in evaluating the probabilities of risks and rewards can lead to suboptimal decisions for students. We offer suggestions for how policy makers might think about the level of confidence they need to make different types of decisions and how researchers can provide more useful information so that research might appropriately affect decision making.

show abstract

“…Students who were exposed to mathematics textbooks that were ranked high in certain textbook design features, including the quality of the textual presentation and the amount of mathematical practice, dramatically outperformed students who were exposed to other textbooks. Another researcher found that elementary school–level achievement increased as more money was spent on textbooks (Holden, ).…”

Section: Rationalementioning

confidence: 99%