For the final witness in their case defending Pennsylvania’s current school funding system, legislative leaders on Wednesday called an economist and longtime critic of school funding increases who has testified in 24 previous school funding lawsuits: Dr. Eric Hanushek. Hanushek is a senior fellow with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
Hanushek testified about his critique of the 2007 Pennsylvania costing-out study, which was commissioned by the state legislature to determine the level of funding needed for an education that allows students to reach state academic standards. The consulting firm Augenblick, Palaich and Associates (APA) performed the study.
APA’s report developed a base cost per student necessary for adequate funding, including weights to adjust this cost for students with additional needs. Some of the reports’ findings were incorporated into the PA School Code section 2052.48 in 2008 and were used to calculate state school funding targets for the next three years. The state legislature and the Pennsylvania Department of Education do not currently attempt to calculate targets for adequate funding in any way.
Professor Matt Kelly of Penn State, an expert called by petitioners in this case, used these benchmarks written in the School Code to calculate “adequacy targets” for each school district in Pennsylvania. Across Pennsylvania, he found that schools are collectively short $4.6 billion of this target for adequate funding, and that low-wealth districts have deeper shortfalls than their higher-wealth counterparts.
Kelly’s report also found that Pennsylvania’s poorest school districts—which tend to serve student bodies that need more support—spend $4,800 less per student than its wealthiest districts. In addition, Kelly found that economically disadvantaged students who attend wealthy districts perform better academically than their peers in low-wealth districts do.
During his testimony, Hanushek took the position that the APA study, and all costing-out studies, cannot provide useful information to policymakers because they are based on an assumption that there is a known relationship between increased funding and increased academic achievement. In his view, which he first expressed in 1981, that assumption is wrong, and there is insufficient evidence of a relationship between money and student performance. On cross-examination, however, Hanushek acknowledged that in another school funding case, he had testified that it was “entirely appropriate for courts and legislatures to accept the opinions that come from various ways of costing-out studies in arriving at their decisions about what costs should be.”
Hanushek’s opinions on the link between money and achievement, the APA study, and costing-out studies in general were questioned during cross-examination Wednesday afternoon and Thursday morning by attorney for petitioners Maura McInerney of the Education Law Center.
To support his claim that there is insufficient evidence of a link between school spending and achievement, Hanushek cited his own reviews of the research literature on the subject conducted in 1997 and 2003. He acknowledged that recent studies have found strong positive links between sustained increases in school funding and student achievement. These include research using new techniques, such as the longitudinal study of students in 28 states conducted in 2015 by Rucker Johnson, an expert called by petitioners in this case. Hanushek’s view on the subject has not changed, he said.
During direct examination, Hanushek said that a major flaw in the APA study was that it was based on a goal of school districts meeting 100% proficiency in reading and math by 2014, consistent with the targets set by the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which was in effect at the time. “I know of no school, state, or country that has reached 100% proficient,” he said.
During cross examination, Hanushek conceded that the spending targets in the APA study were developed in part by studying 82 Pennsylvania school districts that had reached interim goals for proficiency: 81% proficiency in reading, and 78% proficiency in math. This technique is known as the “successful schools” method for determining a base cost for adequate funding.
McInerney said that costing-out studies – which have been conducted in 40 states, are often ordered by legislatures, and have been cited in court cases – are meant to figure out “as best we can” whether or not school districts have the resources they need to provide educational services that meet state standards. She asked Hanushek if his position is that this question simply cannot be answered by any study. “I don’t think there’s any scientific way to answer the underlying questions you’ve posed,” he said.
However, he said he did once submit a proposal to do a costing-out study, but “I was not chosen to be the person doing it.”
And he agreed with McInerney that he wouldn’t want his position to be characterized as “money doesn’t matter,” saying, “You don’t have a school without teachers and buildings.”
Hanushek agreed that students with disabilities, students learning English, and economically disadvantaged students all require more resources for their education than their peers. He believes that, when it comes to student achievement, “money can matter, and it probably at times matters, but the problem is that we don’t know when it’s going to matter.”
He agreed that there are instances in which money improves achievement, and that money, if used efficiently, can lead to higher achievement. Overcoming poverty with appropriate educational programs “is possible if we use our resources well,” he said.
He confirmed that student proficiency on standardized tests is an important goal and agreed with excerpts from his prior writing on the subject, read to him by McInerney. Test scores, he wrote, “say a lot about what our labor force will look like over the coming decades,” and “our current student skills will dictate our economic future in the long run.”
McInerney questioned Hanushek about his 2013 participation as a member of the Equity and Excellence Commission appointed by the U.S. Department of Education that called for a reform of school financing. Congress charged the commission to study “disparities in meaningful educational opportunities” that give rise to the achievement gap.
Hanushek joined with the other commissioners in a report making several recommendations for strategies to improve school performance. These included: quality teachers and school leaders; quality early learning, especially for low-income children who need it most; support to increase parent engagements; access to health and social services; and extended instructional time and assistance for at-risk groups of students in high-poverty communities that need to “start strong and stay on track.”
Asked whether Pennsylvania public schools has the resources they need to put those strategies in place, Hanushek said that he did not know and that he had not studied that question.
With respondents completing their witness testimony, the trial moves into its final stages. On Tuesday, petitioners plan to call professor Matt Kelly as a rebuttal witness, and may call limited additional rebuttal witnesses.