Professor Rucker Johnson, a leading researcher on the impact of changes in school funding on student achievement and life outcomes, has taken a systematic and comprehensive approach in his econometric studies. His conclusion is clear.
“School funding, school resource equity, is an essential investment to advance student achievement,” he said during his testimony on Thursday. He described a growing body of research showing that academic performance gaps based on poverty and race can be significantly narrowed.
Two factors in particular, he said, are important in effective school funding reform: the adequacy, or the level of increase in school funding, and the progressivity of the reform, or how well it targets the districts with the greatest level of need.
“It's both the adequacy paired with the progressivity of the funding formula that have to be done in tandem in order for us to ensure equal educational opportunity is there,” Johnson said.
Sustained investments, from pre-K through 12th grade, “not one year, because the state decides to do something, followed by a different decision in the following year,” are also important, he said.
Johnson, who testified on Thursday and Friday, is a professor of public policy at University of California, Berkeley and a labor economist.
With colleagues from Northwestern University, Johnson conducted a 2015 study using a nationally representative sample of 15,000 students, two-thirds of whom were from low-income backgrounds. His work relied on a data set, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, that allowed him to track educational attainment and income for these students from birth to adulthood.
The study looked at the effects of school finance reforms that were ordered by courts in 28 states. The average reform, Johnson said, led to a 10 to 15% percent increase in per-pupil school funding, often targeted to the most disadvantaged districts.
The study found that increased funding for public schools led to significant increases in educational attainment and other gains – effects that were more pronounced for low-income students. A 10% increase in per-pupil funding for all 12 years of education for low-income students was found to increase completed education by half a year and high school graduation rates by 6-8%, led to 10% higher adult earnings, and a 6 percentage point reduction in adult poverty.
“The results show that it is a dose response,” he said, “so if you want to do small, you will get small improvements, but they will be significant, they will just be smaller. If you want to pursue big improvements, then you're going to have to increase it proportionately.”
Studies by other researchers have confirmed his work, Johnson said. For example, studies of 1990s school funding reforms from researchers Jeff Rothstein and Diane Schanzenbach found significant improvements in reading and math scores across grade levels and positive effects on student earnings.
“What we see is that the evolution of the achievement gap is not something that's like in some kind of cement,” he said, “that can't be alleviated because there's some family background disadvantage.”
Pennsylvania has not yet had a major school funding reform, Johnson said, and the current funding system in the state, based heavily on local property taxes, is deeply regressive.
In some states, Johnson said, districts serving more students in poverty are able to spend more per student than affluent districts, as state funding accounts for poor districts’ higher level of student need and lower ability to raise funds locally. That’s not the case in Pennsylvania, where low-income districts are able to spend 20% less than non-poor districts, he said.
In Pennsylvania, 59% of school funding is raised locally, Johnson said, and more than three quarters of those funds come from property taxes; 91% of the inequality in revenue between districts in Pennsylvania is explained by the difference between what districts can raise in property taxes.
Pennsylvania does have a funding formula to allocate state funding based on need, but it applies to less than 15% of total state aid, he said. Pennsylvania has some of the widest achievement gaps between high-wealth and low-wealth districts in the country–among the top 10, Johnson said. “And that’s not the top 10 we want to be in as a state.”
“I'm not saying that there aren't some students overcoming the odds. I'm not saying that there's not a lot of students that are resilient,” Johnson said. “I'm saying the support that they're getting from the state's funding formula and system is systematically making the odds of that success steeper, more difficult and unfair on equity grounds.”
Johnson’s research has also explored the impact of Head Start, and how those effects interact with K-12 school funding. His study found the positive impact of Head Start fades more rapidly when students go on to attend under-resourced K-12 systems. However, when Head Start is combined with increases in resources for K-12 education, its positive effects are multiplied.
Johnson is also finding positive effects on student achievement in a study of the impact of a recent school funding reform in California, using student data from every student in the state. Known as the Local Control Funding Formula, this reform, adopted in 2013, provides $18 billion in increased state funding over eight years, targeted towards school districts with the most disadvantaged students: students in poverty, students in foster care, and others.
Controlling for out-of-school factors and baseline math scores, Johnson showed that a $1,000 per pupil increase in funding per year led to a full year of learning growth in math for students over the course of middle school.
“When we think about ‘what does money buy,’ what money buys is teacher salaries that can affect the quality of the teaching workforce you’re able to attract,” Johnson said. “What it affects is the support staff, what it affects is not having buildings that are leaking, not having outdated ventilation systems.”
And students also are aware of the effects of inadequate and inequitable investments in public education, he said.
“The students on the ground, the school district leaders, the practitioners who you’ve heard from, they know it better than anybody,” Johnson said.
Next week, petitioners will call their final witnesses to the stand: Paul Horvath, a recent graduate of Wilkes-Barre Area School District and an individual petitioner in the case; Uri Monson, chief financial officer of the School District of Philadelphia; Nancy Hacker, former superintendent of the School District of Springfield Township; and Brian Costello, superintendent of petitioner Wilkes-Barre Area School District.