{"id":4730,"date":"2012-03-20T05:30:58","date_gmt":"2012-03-20T09:30:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=4730"},"modified":"2012-03-20T15:02:32","modified_gmt":"2012-03-20T19:02:32","slug":"fun-with-education-funding-and-roi-historically","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=4730","title":{"rendered":"Fun with education funding and ROI, historically"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As I wrote in the entry from March 10 on <a href=\"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=4675\">manipulated charts<\/a>, ((Yes, there&#8217;s a new addition there in response to Andrew Coulson.)) there&#8217;s a legitimate discussion to be had about investments in education, returns on investment, and so forth, but not if we start with manipulated presentations. What sorts of questions are relevant? I&#8217;m a little hesitant to dive in, as I have published exactly one piece on the topic (and that one an historical perspective on Florida&#8217;s education finance system). But since <a href=\"http:\/\/jaypgreene.com\/2012\/03\/14\/professor-dorn-dodges-the-point\/\">Matthew Ladner is clamoring<\/a> for us to look at forests rather than trees, and there is relatively little research on long-term perspectives, I&#8217;ll try for something historical.<\/p>\n<h4><!--more-->Spending<\/h4>\n<p>First, let me rescue the one point of Andrew Coulson that&#8217;s interesting: in summing inflation-adjusted expenditures on education per pupil over a &#8220;typical&#8221; school career (13 years), in essence he is arguing for a long-term moving average as a better measure of expenditure changes than year-to-year or two-year averages. Is there a substantive difference when you do that? To get a long-term view on per-pupil expenditures, before 1970 you have to work with the biennial reports of the old Office of Education. From the 2009 <em>Digest of Education Statistics<\/em> <a href=\"http:\/\/nces.ed.gov\/programs\/digest\/d09\/tables\/dt09_182.asp\">Table 182<\/a> (supplemented by <a href=\"http:\/\/nces.ed.gov\/programs\/digest\/d10\/tables\/dt10_190.asp?referrer=list\">2007-08 data<\/a> from the 2010 <em>Digest<\/em>), I used the current expenditures per fall enrollee, adjusted for inflation for every other year from 1929-30 to 2007-08, ((Smoothing the other three series across 13 years ends up with very similar profiles over the years.)) and calculated change in two ways:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Annualized change from the prior date (two years before) ((I annualized by taking half the natural log of the ratio of expenditures.))<\/li>\n<li>Annualized change across the 13-year moving average, calculated as the average of the central year and 2, 4, and 6 years before and after the central year. ((Annualization of the change in moving average is calculated the same way as for the biennial expenditure figures.))<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>With a 13-year moving average, the comparison with the biennial change lops off the biennial changes at the beginning and end of the time series, but you still end up with a very interesting pattern that I bet will be familiar to education finance researchers:<\/p>\n<div><a href=\"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/03\/Annualized-expenditure-changes.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-4733\" title=\"Annualized expenditure changes\" src=\"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/03\/Annualized-expenditure-changes.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"618\" height=\"500\" srcset=\"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/03\/Annualized-expenditure-changes.png 794w, https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/03\/Annualized-expenditure-changes-300x242.png 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 618px) 100vw, 618px\" \/><\/a><\/div>\n<p>As you should have expected, the moving average eliminates the substantial noise you see in short-term expenditure changes, which are noticeable even when calculated at the national level. The large-scale feature when you use the very-long-term moving average is the difference between the first few decades with substantial per-pupil expenditure growth, generally over 4% (beyond inflation) when annualized, and the last few decades, where per-pupil expenditure growth drops below 3% and generally stays around 2% over inflation. (Addition: See Bruce Baker&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/schoolfinance101.wordpress.com\/2011\/01\/12\/understanding-education-costs-versus-inflation\/\">comments on inflation adjustments<\/a>.) What happened at the transition point, in the early 1970s? Remember that for the 13-year moving average, the reference year would normally be <em>about<\/em> the 6th-grade year for a cohort. A 1970 sixth-grade year translates into a late-1950s birth cohort, or just after the peak of the Baby Boom. You&#8217;d see somewhat different features with a 3- or 5-year moving average, a slightly-later peak in the 1960s and deeper troughs corresponding to inflation in the late 1970s and the early-90s recession, but the 13-year moving average captures the longer-term change coinciding with the end of the Baby Boom.\u00a0Over 80 years, per-pupil expenditures have averaged about 2% or above (beyond inflation) when you look at the whole country and a student&#8217;s career (not single years or states\/small areas). And that average long-term expenditure increase was higher for children born during the upswing of the Baby Boom than since.<\/p>\n<p>There are three fundamental questions I have on the spending side:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>What other large patterns of social spending also rose at a 2% or higher annualized rate on a per-unit basis?<\/li>\n<li>What explains the substantial drop in annualized long-term spending increases on education after the end of the Baby Boom?<\/li>\n<li>How does this national picture change if you disaggregate it by region or state? Addendum: See Bruce Baker&#8217;s notes on <a href=\"http:\/\/schoolfinance101.wordpress.com\/2010\/11\/11\/getting-all-bubbly-over-that-spending-bubble\/\">spending <\/a>and <a href=\"http:\/\/schoolfinance101.wordpress.com\/2010\/12\/23\/is-it-the-new-normal-or-the-new-stupid\/\">more<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>How does this national picture change if you look at private school spending?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>This longer-term picture undermines the stories told <em>either<\/em>\u00a0by folks such as Coulson who focus on supposedly low productivity increases in education in the past 40 years or by those who rely on a 1970s broadening of educational rights (including the rights of individuals with disabilities) and mandates (such as health education, drivers ed, etc.) as a driver of spending. There is something more complicated going on. ((Yes, I&#8217;ve done the obvious cursory check to see if I could find an analysis of education spending that started before 1970, and at least for the search terms I tried, no dice.))<\/p>\n<h4>Return on investments in education<\/h4>\n<p>The &#8220;productivity&#8221; side of the question is more complicated because most of the putative outcome measures for schooling are at best proxies for the broader social value the majority of Americans attach to public schooling. We cannot measure the return on the investment in the area of &#8220;better citizenship,&#8221; but we can look at test scores or attainment data. As long as one understands that we cannot measure everything we expect from schools, we can see the proxies as small slices. In some areas, it looks like we&#8217;re standing still since the late 1960s: NAEP trend data for 17-year-olds, well-defined high school graduation rates. In other areas, we have some noticeable improvement over 40 years: school access for students with disabilities, NAEP trend data for younger children, college attendance and completion. And in some areas, the time of greatest improvement was also the time of highest annualized expenditure increases: high school graduation (but not because of the acceleration of spending at the time0.<\/p>\n<p>The better research on educational return on investment is attainment or exposure related: economists&#8217; and psychologists&#8217; research on long-term outcomes from high school graduation, college, early childhood, and so forth. But that is generally on a micro level: the value of investment by individual students and children. It does not mean we&#8217;ve gotten our &#8220;bang for the buck&#8221; at the national level. It also doesn&#8217;t mean we haven&#8217;t. I am not persuaded that we can answer that return-for-the-investment question with something as complicated as schooling with as little trustworthy data sources over the long term.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As I wrote in the entry from March 10 on manipulated charts, ((Yes, there&#8217;s a new addition there in response to Andrew Coulson.)) there&#8217;s a legitimate discussion to be had about investments in education, returns on investment, and so forth, but not if we start with manipulated presentations. What sorts of questions are relevant? I&#8217;m [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4730","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education-policy","category-history"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-1ei","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4730","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4730"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4730\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4741,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4730\/revisions\/4741"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4730"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4730"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4730"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}