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Literature on Funding and School Performance

The literature that is being reviewed is aimed at proving that the levels of school funding can significantly affect the overall success of the school and student performance. Determining whether a school is successful can be measured in a couple different ways such as looking at dependent variables, standardized test scores, graduation rates, and the percentage of students that are seeking higher education. Several of the articles that will be reviewed take a look at ways the funding and resources that are available to schools effects different aspects of education and how not all schools are giving students the best chances to excel. The article, The Impact of Accountability on Racial and socioeconomic Equity: Considering Both School Resources and Achievement Outcomes written by Jaekyoung Lee and Kenneth K. Wong, examines performance braced accountability policies and their effect on school performance. Another Article that will be reviewed is Does School Quality Matter? Returns to Education and the Characteristics of Public Schools in the United States, written by David Card and Alan Krueger. In the article they analyze the effects that differing qualities of education have on students in their lives many years down the road. This article will provide a better look at the effects that a properly running school can have on the lives of the students. Test Scores, Dropout Rates, and Transfer Rates as Alternative Indicators of High School Performance, written by Russell W. Rumberger and Gregory J. Palardy is an investigatory article that takes a look at whether or not attrition rates are causing poor performing schools.

Jaekyung Lee and Kenneth K. Wong

The article, The Impact of Accountability on Racial and Socioeconomic Equity: Both School Resources and Achievement Outcomes. Written by Jaekyung Lee and Kenneth K. Wong covers many important issues that concern the performance of schools and how racial and socioeconomic concerns are impacted when accountability and performance based funding are implemented. The authors look to see whether holding schools accountable for their success works or if it is making these achievement gaps worse. In the study they did look at school resources and the effects of expenditures for the schools. They were also about to figure out that these policies did not bring any significant improvements as well. The authors did their study in the 1990’s and did make connections to No Child Left Behind. The authors stated, “Racial and socioeconomic equity should be at the center of accountability reforms. Because the NCLB requires reporting disaggregated achievement data by racial and socioeconomic subgroups, it is equally critical.” There were many strength and weakness to the article. The strength concerning the research question about funding was that the article did show how accountability policy affects the funding for schools in different socioeconomic groups. The article works very well with the research question. When it comes to weakness the article could have had more variables, which we do see in other studies.

David Card and Alan B. Krueger

David Card and Alan B Krueger wrote a fantastic article in The Journal of Political Economy titled, Does School Quality Matter? Returns to Education and Characteristics of Public Schools in the United States. In this article the authors research what affect the quality a school has on the students. The main research that was done looked at students that were born in 1920 and used their earnings to gage how successful they had become by the year 1980. The research is from the twenty century but it is still applicable when looking at school quality today. The article also looks different variables to help judge a schools quality such as, pupil / teacher ratio, average term length, and the relative teacher wages. The authors looked at the different these variables for different states and decades. The variables that were used in this study can be affected by the level of funding a school receives. Some of the results that they found when doing the research that the higher the teaches wage higher the rate of return to the schooling. There are a few weaknesses to the study which do not help answer the research question about school funding. The main problem is that the study is old and does not factor in the many different changes in society. Because the study is old it will be hard to compare the findings to ones that can be made today. The strengths of the article are that it does give a historical look at how schools were performing and compared in the twentieth century. Such as the, Biennial Survey of Education and the Digest of Education Statistics, and can give a guide to compiling data for research.

Stephanie W. Cawthon

The article, Hidden Benefits and Unintended Consequences of “No Child Left Behind” Policies for Students Who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing, Written by Stephanie W. Cawthon, researches a influential piece of legislation that has direct affects on the funding and success that schools have. One of the major parts of a schools success is providing a quality education for all students including ones with special needs. The consequences of NCLB are accommodation and intergrading test scores, alternative assessments, differential effect on educational structures. The author was able to find at in most case students who are deaf and hard of hearing were able to use special accommodations but did not always take advantage of them. The results found that the benefits of NCLB included student outcomes, reporting frameworks, and accommodation research. The consequences of NCLB are accommodation and intergrading test scores, alternative assessments, differential effect on educational structures. The strength of the article was its ability to compile date from different states with different policies to find how NCLB affects the students. The weakness was that when looking to see how these policies effect school funding we have to make inferences because there was not direct connection in the study.

Russell W. Rumberger and Gregory J. Palardy

Russell W. Rumberger and Gregory J. Palardy wrote an influential article when discussing how school performance is measured. Their article is titled, Test scores, Dropout Rates, and Transfer Rates as Alternative indicators of High School Performance. The authors make the case in this article that when studying school performance there are several different variable that should be used to be able to gage how well a school is doing. These variables include both dropout rates, transfer rates and test scores. In the article the authors explain why they used multiple variables to measure school performance by stating, “One reason for using multiple indicators of school performance is that some schools perform better on one type of outcome than another.” They go on to state, “Another reason of using multiple indicators of school performance measures is that the goal of improving one outcome may actually conflict with the goal of improving the other.” This article covered the empirical research that was done in the study and they looked at many different factors which included student characteristics, structural characteristics, school resources, and school process. The authors compared Achievement growth, dropout, transfer, and attrition rates for several different types of schools, types of students, and found some interesting results. The article states, “In other words in some high schools students learn more than twice as much as students in other high schools. Dropout, transfer, and attrition rates vary even more… These results suggest that where students attend high school has a great deal to do with how much they learn and their chances of graduating.” After the authors have found out that were students go to school matters they made it their goal to figure out what is causing these schools to perform differently.In an end result the authors found that that there are differences in these different variables but they all do play a role in determining how to judge how well a school is performing. This article has much strength such as they complied a large amount of data and did explain at the end how it can be applied.

Ingo Liefner

Funding, Resources, Allocation, and Performance in Higher Education Systems written by Ingo Liefner for the journal Higher Education, is a bit different than the other articles in this review for a couple reasons. The first and most important reason is that the article was written about schools in a European system and secondly the research that was done focused on higher education rather that primary and secondary schools. This variation gives a good diversity which aides in the understanding of what impact funding has on school quality. There are several strengths to the article such as it looks at how fund are allocated to universities and how the universities use the money, The second strength is that the study looks at performance based funding and its effects which is similar to No Child Left behind. There are clear weaknesses to the article, first is that the study was done in Europe and secondly that the article studies universities. There were several questions that the authors were trying to answer. First, “how does resource allocation very among the higher education systems of several nations?” Second, “what methods do universities employ to allocate their internal resources?” Third, “how does performance-based budgeting affect individual faculty behavior?” Fourth, “Does the national tradition of funding universities influence the applicability / outcome of performance based methods of budgeting and the impact of monetary incentives?” Lastly, “Does the method of resource allocation directly affect the long-term success of the university?” In the study the authors found some important data regarding school funding. Funding for universities in Europe is has have larger public funding but and it less performance based. When it comes to universities in the United States they have performance based public funding, and in the case of MIT there is no level of public funding. The largest area of performance based funding was from the University of Twente in the Netherlands and the University of Bristol in Great Britain. The author was able to point out that the performance based funding did have some affect on the schools success.

Bibliography

Card David, Alan B. Krueger. “Does School Quality Matter? Returns to Education and Characteristics of Public Schools in the United Sates” The Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 100 No.1, February, 1992 Pg. 1-40 The University of Chicago Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2138804. 2/15/2011.

Cawthon Stephanie W.. Hidden Benefits and Unintended Consequences of ‘No Child Left
Behind’ Policies forStudents Who Are Deaf or Hard of Hearing. American Educational Research Journal, Vol.44, No. 3, September,2007, Pages 460-492. American Education Research Association. http://jstor.org/stable/30069425. 2/15/2011.

Lee Jaekyoung, Kenneth K. Wong. “The Impact of Accountability on Racial and Socioeconomic Equity: Considering Both School Resources and Achievement Outcomes.” American Educational Research Journal, Vol. 41, No.4, Winter 2004, Pages 797-832. American Educational Research Association. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3699464 2/15/2011.

Liefner Ingo. “Resource Allocation, and Performace in Higher Education Systems.” Higher Education, Vol. 46, No.4, December, 2003, Pages, 469-489. Springer. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3447572 2/15/2011.

Rumberger Russell W., Gregory J. Palardy. Test Scores, Dropout Rates and Transfer Rates as Alternative Indicators of High School performance. American Educational Research Journal, Vol. 42, No.1 Spring, 2005, Pages 3-42. American Educational Research Association. http//.jstor.org/stable/36994554. 2/20/2011.