The school finance reforms (SFRs) that
began in the early 1970s and accelerated in the 1980s caused some of the most
dramatic changes in the structure of K-12 education spending in U.S.
history. The authors of this study analyze the
effects of these reforms on the level and distribution of school district
spending, as well as their effects on subsequent educational and economic
outcomes.
In Part One, using a newly compiled
database of school finance reforms and a recently available long panel of
annual school district data on per-pupil spending that spans 1967-2010, The
authors present an event-study analysis of the effects of different types of
school finance reforms on per-pupil spending in low- and high-income school districts.
The authors find that SFRs have been
instrumental in equalizing school spending between low- and high-income
districts and many reforms do so by increasing spending for poor districts. While all reforms reduce spending
inequality, there are important differences by reform type: adequacy-based court-ordered reforms
increase overall school spending, while equity-based court-ordered reforms reduce
the variance of spending with little effect on overall levels; reforms that
entail high tax prices (the amount of taxes a district must raise to increase
spending by one dollar) reduce long-run spending for all districts, and those
that entail low tax prices lead to increased spending growth, particularly for
low-income districts.
In Part Two, the authors link the
spending and reform data to detailed, nationally-representative data on
children born between 1955 and 1985 and followed through 2011 (the Panel Study
of Income Dynamics) to study the effect of the reform-induced changes in school
spending on long-run adult outcomes.
These birth cohorts straddle the period in which most of the major
school finance reform litigation accelerated, and thus the cohorts were
differentially exposed, depending on place and year of birth.
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