Economist Eric Hanushek of Hoover at Stanford frequently testifies that how money is spent matters far more than how much is spent. Actually both matter. In Ohio, for example, the $2 Billion spent on low-performing online virtual charter school ECOT was a waste of money. California and Florida and other states have wasted billions on low performing charter schools and charters that close in mid-year.
Bill Phillis, former deputy Commissioner of Education in Ohio responds here:
“Eric Hanushek, Stanford University Economist: “How money is spent is more important than how much is spent.”
“Dr. Hanushek was at the Statehouse January 31 participating with a group of experts assembled to discuss how to improve Ohio’s education system. The participants agreed that Ohio’s prosperity is tied to education attainment.
“Most states that have had to defend a constitutional challenge to the school funding system have involved Eric Hanushek one way or another. Dr. Hanushek can be counted on to support inadequate, inequitable school funding systems. His deal-how money is spent is important-is a no brainer. Of course, how money is spent is consequential. (The Ohio charter industry with its poster child ECOT has demonstrated the importance of how money is spent.) But the total amount of funds available is extremely significant.
“Unfortunately, many boards of education, particularly in low wealth districts, have the task of determining which valuable programs and services to put on the chopping block.
“Dr. Hanushek can and does produce data sets that show an increase in funding may not produce a commensurate increase in student achievement. But test scores are not the only measure of the benefits students accrue from the public common school.
“One sure way to diminish education attainment is to adopt Dr. Hanshek’s philosophy that higher levels of funding are not consequential. Ohio continues to operate an inadequate, inequitable, unconstitutional system.”
William L. Phillis | Ohio Coalition for Equity & Adequacy of School Funding | 614.228.6540 | ohioeanda@sbcglobal.net| http://www.ohiocoalition.org
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Eric Hanushek, Stanford University Economist has not spent enough time in real schools to opine about the proper expenditure of funds.
I am reasonably confident that his chopping block mindset would rid schools completely of school counselors, all programming in the arts and physical education. Also, the cost of AP courses have been analyzed and found to be among the most expensive to offer.
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Hanushek is WRONG again.
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In Oakland, our district continues to have no problem paying millions for consultants, as well as a bloated central office administration. Funding for libraries, on the other hand, always seems to be conspicuously out of reach.
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Excellent example! It’s not “either/or,” it’s “and.” And “and” means being fiscally responsible by spending funds where they are most needed and effective. “And” also means looking at entire macro budgets, not just categories. “And” is also an argument for why this blog must focus on education, but not to the exclusion of all other issues which affect education—policies like guns, environment, military spending, and so on. “Either/or” creates false priorities, uninformed decision making and political straw men. That’s why “fiscally conservative or liberal” have become as meaningless as the terms “conservative and liberal.” It’s about being responsible and addressing real problems vs. irresponsible and creating false talking points.
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Erik VAMushek in a nutshell: keep eliminating the lowest 5% and you will eventually reform your way to Nirvana.
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Don’t forget to spend all the money you have left — after funding privatization — on annual tests, computers for the tests, wi-di for the computers, VAM data analytics, score publication, test prep materials, consultants, and cheerleaders. For example, a Common Core-obsessed principal could fund a counseling position called “College and Career Ready Advisor” to do test prep instead of real counseling. That same principal could spend what could have gone to having a full time school nurse or reducing class sizes on private consultants to teach teachers how to test prep. That very same principal could be misappropriating all those funds at a school nowhere near the bottom 5%, but who cares? Testing the students is like way better than supporting their growth and development. Real smart. Balanced. Destroy your way to the top!
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SomeDAM Poet: your summary of Hanushek is spot on.
And worth far more than his assertion that “How money is spent is more important than how much is spent.”
While I thank one and all for their comments on this thread, just a reminder that we are spending time and effort on a vacuous string of words that has more holes in it than a piece of that proverbial Swiss cheese.
As well as the fact that this reveals—quelle horreur !—the intellectual caliber of someone who has unashamedly been in the forefront of misusing and abusing numbers & stats in the service of smash-and-grab corporate education reform.
Just the sort of fella whose attitude toward reality and Rheeality is in perfect harmony with the intellectual degradation associated with his beloved high-stakes standardized tests:
“Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.”
Didn’t even need an old dead Greek guy. Homegrown talent worked just fine.
Mark Twain was his name. Wit was his game.
😎
P.S. But, sadly, the Hanusheks has been around for quite a while. It’s just that, long long ago, as Stephen Leacock reminds us, they had to cut to the chase without all that numerology stuff: “In ancient times they had no statistics so they had to fall back on lies.”
🙄
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What is clear is that access to public money is the main objective, not results. There are many measures that can be applied to determine the impact of education, not just test scores, which as we know, fall along socio-economic levels. What is also abundantly clear is that communities cannot afford to run parallel schools of dubious value along with strong public schools for the SAME DOLLAR amount.
Public schools are accountable to the public. They are independently audited, and they offer the best value to communities as good public schools enhance real estate values. Public schools offer far more legitimate “choice” than most charters or voucher schools, and public schools are operated by trained professionals, not reckless entrepreneurs looking to make a fast dollar. Any community that entrusts their tax dollars to venture capitalists is naive as billions of dollars have been wasted this way. They should take a look at all the waste and fraud in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida. Some of these states have caused an economic disaster in the entire state from excessive charter and voucher drain. Privatization costs taxpayers more for worse results!
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Sounds like the arrogance of telling someone who is hungry that how much food you is not as important as what you eat.
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Spending money on Erik Hanushek is a waste of money.
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Does Hanushek have kids of his own? What kind of schools did they go to? Were they taught more inexpensively than with my kids?
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If he does, I bet they went to the same private schools the Silicon Valley elite do. They certainly spend a lot of money and, as Diane has posted on many occasions, they have excellent schools that do not in any way mirror what they are supporting for the masses.
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VAMbots don’t have kids.
Just other bots.
Have you heard about the singularity?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
Well, its already here in the form of Erik VAMushek.
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When I was in grad school the statistics professor taught us something very valuable- you can make statistics say whatever you want. Statistics formulated for business do not necessarily correlate to education. The variables in education are vast and differ from school to school, district to district ( and state to state etc) Therefore, some statistics can create a surface impression that does not address all the issues inherent in the problem being approached. This, to me, is one of those cases.
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My dad always used to say, “There are three kinds of lies. Lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
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Also, when using quantitative measures to provide “objective” measures, then the result is objectifying students.
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MInor correction:
“Also, when using PSEUDO quantitative measures to provide “PSEUDO-objective” measures, then the result is objectifying students.”
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Not only objectifying the students, but the students internalize, “subjectifize” those assessments/evaluations into their own being, many times for the worse. Remember bluebirds, sparrows and eagles groupings from the 50s/60s when tracking was the newewst and bestest edu-deform of the day. I know a few who it took many years, decades to break out of the self-imposed internalization from being labeled as a “not so bright”, which the kids knew meant “stupid”, student.
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It’s nice they add some additional perspective to the hearings. This dude’s marriage to the director of CREDO isn’t likely to interfere in these independent data points at all.
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But Diane Ravitch has reported at least one instance where Margaret Raymond, Hanushek’s wife, admitted that the reform model of school choice wasn’t working as hoped.
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I posted this article from NIH once before but feel it needs repeating. This early childhood program in a low income Chicago school was proven by researchers to work. The problem of expanding it was that it would be way too expensive to promote for every school. The amount of money does matter. Class sizes matter. You cannot have good class sizes and expensive enrichment programs with no funding.
………
Graduates of early childhood program show greater educational gains as adults
NIH-funded study observes higher attainment of college degrees.
Students who participated in an intensive childhood education program from preschool to third grade were more likely to achieve an academic degree beyond high school, compared to a similar group that received other intervention services as children, according to a study funded by the National Institutes of Health.
Researchers led by Arthur Reynolds, Ph.D., at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, followed the 30-year progress of 989 children who attended the Child-Parent Centers (CPC) program in inner-city Chicago as preschoolers. Their findings appear in JAMA Pediatrics.
“This study suggests that a high-quality, early childhood intervention program, especially one that extends through third grade, can have benefits well into adult life,” said James A. Griffin, Ph.D., deputy chief of the Child Development Branch at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD).
The CPC program provides intensive instruction in reading and math, combined with frequent educational field trips, from pre-kindergarten through third grade. The program also provides parents with job and parenting skills training, educational classes and social services. In addition, the program encouraged parents to volunteer in classrooms, assist with field trips and participate in parenting support groups.
Researchers compared the educational outcomes of graduates from 20 CPC schools to those of 550 children from low-income families who attended 5 other early randomly selected schools in the Chicago area with childhood intervention programs. The researchers collected information on the children from administrative records, schools and families, from birth through 35 years of age.
On average, graduates of the CPC program—whether they took part in preschool only or attended until second or third grade—completed more years of education than those who participated in other early intervention programs…
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/graduates-early-childhood-program-show-greater-educational-gains-adults
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Reduced class size with proper qualified professionals in the room are the only thing, yeah, the only thing that will make a difference in the teaching and learning process.
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“If you think education is expensive, wait until you see how much ignorance costs.” ~ Barack Obama
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True, but Obama supported VAM, merit pay, and charter schools!
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Arthur Camins:
You are correct, sir.
And quite right in reminding us of that fact.
😎
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If you think No Child Left Behind is expensive, wait till you see how much Common Core and Race to the Top cost.
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“The participants agreed that Ohio’s prosperity is tied to education attainment.”
Don’t give a damn about “education attainment” whatever the hell that is supposed to mean. I give a damn about providing the proper school environment and services so that all students may enjoy their constitutional right to a fair and equitable public school education. That supposed “attainment” is just another “output” weasel word meant to put public schooling on par with manufacturing whatever item.
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“But test scores are not ANY KIND OF measure of the benefits students accrue from the public common school.”
There, adjusted the sentence to make it make sense.
Until we cease and desist in using the edudeformer language, in this case the false usage of “measure” to imply a certain “scientific” objectivity to a process that is completely subjective, we’ll keep losing ground on folks like Hanushek.
The most misleading concept/term in education is “measuring student achievement” or “measuring student learning”. The concept has been misleading educators into deluding themselves that the teaching and learning process can be analyzed/assessed using “scientific” methods which are actually pseudo-scientific at best and at worst a complete bastardization of rationo-logical thinking and language usage.
There never has been and never will be any “measuring” of the teaching and learning process and what each individual student learns in their schooling. There is and always has been assessing, evaluating, judging of what students learn but never a true “measuring” of it.
But, but, but, you’re trying to tell me that the supposedly august and venerable APA, AERA and/or the NCME have been wrong for more than the last 50 years, disseminating falsehoods and chimeras??
Who are you to question the authorities in testing???
Yes, they have been wrong and I (and many others, Wilson, Hoffman etc. . . ) question those authorities and challenge them (or any of you other advocates of the malpractices that are standards and testing) to answer to the following onto-epistemological analysis:
The TESTS MEASURE NOTHING, quite literally when you realize what is actually happening with them. Richard Phelps, a staunch standardized test proponent (he has written at least two books defending the standardized testing malpractices) in the introduction to “Correcting Fallacies About Educational and Psychological Testing” unwittingly lets the cat out of the bag with this statement:
“Physical tests, such as those conducted by engineers, can be standardized, of course [why of course of course], but in this volume , we focus on the measurement of latent (i.e., nonobservable) mental, and not physical, traits.” [my addition]
Notice how he is trying to assert by proximity that educational standardized testing and the testing done by engineers are basically the same, in other words a “truly scientific endeavor”. The same by proximity is not a good rhetorical/debating technique.
Since there is no agreement on a standard unit of learning, there is no exemplar of that standard unit and there is no measuring device calibrated against said non-existent standard unit, how is it possible to “measure the nonobservable”?
THE TESTS MEASURE NOTHING for how is it possible to “measure” the nonobservable with a non-existing measuring device that is not calibrated against a non-existing standard unit of learning?????
PURE LOGICAL INSANITY!
The basic fallacy of this is the confusing and conflating metrological (metrology is the scientific study of measurement) measuring and measuring that connotes assessing, evaluating and judging. The two meanings are not the same and confusing and conflating them is a very easy way to make it appear that standards and standardized testing are “scientific endeavors”-objective and not subjective like assessing, evaluating and judging.
That supposedly objective results are used to justify discrimination against many students for their life circumstances and inherent intellectual traits.
C’mon test supporters, have at the analysis, poke holes in it, tell me where I’m wrong!
I’m expecting that I’ll still be hearing the crickets and cicadas of tinnitus instead of reading any rebuttal or refutation.
Because there is no rebuttal/refutation!
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I wish you wouldn’t beat around the bush and tell us what you really think (and know). 🙃
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When do ed reformers add some value to Ohio public schools?
It’s been 20 years that this “movement” has utterly dominated Columbus. They have yet to offer a single tangible benefit to any Ohio public school family.
Voters in Ohio need to demand that some of these public employees start supporting the public schools that 90% of Ohio families use.
Demand that they add some value or replace them with people who will.
I’m tired of paying ed reform experts to parachute in here and state their ideological views. I don’t care. I want state employees to serve public schools.
Do your jobs.
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