Return On Investment

Schools in the United States now spend more than $2 billion each year on education technology. But what are schools getting in return for this significant investment in technology learning? Robert Slavin examines the results from five studies designed to answer this question.

This review of the research on secondary reading programs focuses on 69 studies that used random assignment (n=62) or high-quality quasi-experiments (n=7) to evaluate outcomes of 51 programs on widely accepted measures of reading.The study found programs using one-to-one and small-group tutoring (+0.14 to +0.28 effect size), cooperative learning (+0.10 effect size), whole-school approaches including organizational reforms such as teacher teams (+0.06 effect size), and writing-focused approaches (+0.13 effect size) showed positive outcomes. Individual approaches in a few other categories also showed positive impacts. The findings are important suggesting interventions for secondary readers to improve struggling student’s chances of experiencing greater success in high school and better opportunities after graduation.

This analysis examines whether the current mechanisms for providing federal education funding to disadvantaged children are effective and whether the system works as originally intended.

This article examines issues in developing valid and reliable direct observation of behavior. Suggestions are made to minimize the problems that threaten validity and reliability. The discussion is concluded by an examination of costs and benefits of direct observation and who pays them and who benefits from them.

This report explores some of the most financially disadvantaged school districts in the country and identifies a typology of conditions that have created or reinforced their disadvantage. It report lays out a typology of conditions that lead to severe fiscal disadvantage for local public school systems. It then provides examples of states, state policy conditions, and specific local public school districts identified as being severely financially disadvantaged.

This report begins by identifying those states where combined state and local revenues are systematically lower in higher-poverty districts–that is, states with “regressive” school funding distributions. Based on this analysis, the authors focus on six states–Illinois, Texas, New York, Pennsylvania, Missouri, and North Carolina–where children attending school in higher-poverty districts still have substantially less access to state and local revenue than children attending school in lower-poverty districts. With these states in mind, the authors then go beyond recent reports on school funding inequities to uncover some nontraditional causes of these imbalances.

The National Report Card is a critique of state school funding systems and the extent to which these systems ensure equality of educational opportunity for all children, regardless of background, family income, place of residence or school. The report makes the assumption that "fair" school funding is defined as "a state finance system that ensures equal educational opportunity by providing a sufficient level of funding distributed to districts within the state to account for additional needs generated by student poverty."

The Second Edition of the National Report Card on public school funding, Is School Funding Fair?, shows that far too many states continue to deny public schools the essential resources they need to meet the needs of the nation's 53 million students and to boost academic achievement. The National Report Card rates the 50 states on the basis of four "fairness indicators" - funding level, funding distribution, state fiscal effort, and public school coverage. The Report provides the most in-depth analysis to date of state education finance systems and school funding fairness across the nation.

The 3rd Edition of Is School Funding Fair? A National Report Card details how the Great Recession and its aftermath have affected school funding in the states. The National Report Card (NRC) examines each state's level of commitment to equal educational opportunity, regardless of a student's background, family income, or where she or he attends school. Providing fair school funding -- at a sufficient level with additional funds to meet needs generated by poverty -- is crucial if all students are to be afforded the opportunity to learn and be successful.

This report analyzes the disparity in funding and resources in K-12 education for children of color and low-income families. It found that millions of students–largely low-income students and students of color–continue to attend segregated and economically isolated schools. State and district school finance systems perpetuate and compound these inequities by providing less money to students with the greatest need.

This article reviews the economic studies on early childhood education and places them in the context of the larger knowledge base on this topic. It concludes that well designed programs and policies do produce significant results but, most current programs and policies are not well designed or implemented effectively.

The focus of this essay is on which economic methods can complement and enhance impact evaluations. The authors propose the use of six domains to link intervention effectiveness to the best technique needed to determine which practice is the most cost-effective choice.

The authors discuss how to use economic techniques to evaluate educational programs and show how to apply basic cost analysis to implementation of school-wide positive behavior support (SWPBS).

This report analyzes two critical, and sometimes competing, issues in school finance reformer: fiscal equity and fiscal efficiency. It makes the case that fiscal equity and fiscal effectiveness are not mutually exclusive, and this nation needs to do more to improve both the fairness and the productivity of public school dollars. In other words, we need to make sure that schools and districts not only get enough money to serve their student populations but also that they then spend those dollars wisely.

This document is one of a series of reports based on the Special Education Expenditure Project, a study of the nation's spending on special education and related services based on analysis of data for the 1999-2000 school year.

Class size is one variable in American education that research confirms has a positive influence student learning and was then taken to scale across the nation. Unfortunately, the results when applied at scale have not achieved the results expected in the initial studies.

Although many factors combine to make a successful school, most people agree that quality teachers and school principals are among the most important requirements for success, especially when success is defined by the ability of the school to raise the achievement of its students. The central question for this study is how the quality of the teachers and principals in high-poverty schools in North Carolina compares to that in the schools serving more advantaged students.

The costs associated with teacher turnover in Alaska are considerable, but have never been systematically calculated,1 and this study emerged from interests among Alaska education researchers, policymakers, and stakeholders to better understand these costs.

Research on teacher turnover has led to the identification of retention strategies to help advance the profession and improve the recruitment, preparation, and support of teachers. This report summarizes available research on these strategies and discusses potential barriers and research on their relative cost-effectiveness.

Twenty percent of high school students take four or more courses in career and technical education (CTE). Despite this high rate of participation, little is known about what constitutes high-quality CTE and whether high-quality CTE allows participants to accumulate meaningful knowledge and skills to succeed in a career. This study from the Association for Education Finance and Policy examined the impact of participating in CTE on high school attendance, high school completion, professional certifications, and performance on standardized test scores. The evidence suggests that a high-quality CTE program boosts on-time graduation for higher income students and for lower income .

This paper provides a guide to statistically based methods for estimating the extra costs of educating disadvantaged students, shows how these methods are related, and compares state aid programs that account for these costs in different ways. It shows that large, urban school districts with a high concentration of disadvantaged students would receive far more aid (and rich suburban districts would receive far less aid) if statistically based pupil weights were used instead of the ad hoc weights in existing state aid programs.

A Learner Response System (LRS) is a classroom feedback tool that is becoming increasing popular. LRS is the practice of teachers and pupils using electronic handheld devices to provide immediate feedback during lessons. Given that feedback has been found to be a powerful tool in learning, it is not surprising that LRS are being adopted. The important question remains, do LRS increase student performance. This study tests a Learner Response System using Promethean handsets to assess whether it improves student outcomes. The study found no evidence that math and reading were improved using the system for 2 years.

Part One provides the reader with information essential to understanding not only the content of the section that follow but also the wealth of material that exists in the literature on  program evaluation. Part Two introduces you to different approaches to evaluation to enlarge your understanding of the diversity of choices that evaluators and stakeholders make in undertaking evaluation.

This paper estimates the large array of long-run benefits of an influential early childhood program targeted to disadvantaged children and their families. It is evaluated by random assignment and follows participants through their mid-30s. It has substantial beneficial impacts on (a) health and the quality of life, (b) the labor incomes of participants, (c) crime, (d) education, and (e) the labor income of the mothers of the participants through subsidizing their childcare.

In an era of heightened accountability and limited fiscal resources, school districts have sought novel ways to increase the effectiveness of their principals in an effort to increase student proficiency. To address these needs, some districts have turned to pay-for- performance programs, aligning leadership goals with financial incentives to motivate and direct leadership efforts. Pay-for-performance strategies have been applied to schools for decades.

The report examines the effect of state funding systems and high stakes testing on special
education enrollment. 

This report examines the widespread and unjust district budgeting practices and offers Congress a straightforward legislative path: Fix the so-called comparability provisions of Title I.

The goal of this paper was to study twin districts and use the data culled to provide recommendations for how districts can best leverage their school funding investments–in other words, achieve a bigger bang for their educational buck. The findings were: When it comes to education, spending does not always equal results. There are significant funding inequities between demographically similar districts. Districts have limited control over their own expenditures.

Transforming education is one of the signature challenges of our times. This book sets out exactly and undeniably why the only way to do it is to honor and improve the profession of teaching. Written by two of the sharpest educational thinkers in the world, this book is an incisive critique of the failing reform movements in many countries and a powerful manifesto for the only strategy that can and does work.

This report from the Study of School-Level Expenditures presents findings on how state and local education expenditures at the school level vary within school districts.

This article examines the 65% Solution, a reform proposal for school financing.

This report fills an important gap in the literature on school leadership by presenting an approach for understanding the resources and expenditures associated with efforts to prepare, hire, evaluate, develop, and support school leaders and by presenting estimates of those resources and expenditures. 

This report highlights the lack of innovation, flexibility, and new ideas in state financing of public education. It concludes: many state and education leaders continue to support and employ methods that prevent schools and principals from undertaking the efforts that they think are most needed to improve education in their classrooms. The use of state categorical–funds to school districts with strict limits on their use–exemplifies this lack of innovation in school finance.

This article provides a summary of measuring the fiscal impact of practices in education
educational policy.

This study created a model and methodology to document turnover costs for the middle and high schools in the Boston Public Schools to test the degree to which it could detect differences in costs for teachers of science, and to explore the feasibility of its implementation by school personnel

This report examines the current available state remedies for inequity; examine the Equity and Excellence Commission’s findings regarding the inequities that exist in U.S. educa�tion and its five-part agenda to address them; and conclude with recommendations designed to operationalize that agenda and make equal educational opportunity a reality for each and every child in the United States.

The United States has committed to improving the lives of students with disabilities for over 40 years. Since the advent of Federal Law PL 94-142 in 1975 that mandated a free and appropriate education for all students regardless of ability and six reauthorizations of legislation, the federal government has emphasized the need to prepare students with disabilities for post-secondary education, careers, and independent living. The federal investment in funding special education services exceeds $15 Billion annually. It is reasonable to ask, are student with disabilities substantially benefiting from these efforts? The National Longitudinal Transition Study (NLTS) provides the most recent data on youth with disabilities and efforts to address their needs. The study used surveys in 2012 and 2013 on a nationally representative set of nearly 13,000 students. The student included were mostly those with an individualized education program (IEP) and expected to receive special education services. The data reveal participation in key transition activities by youth with an IEP and their parents have declined, although they are just as likely to have gone to an IEP meeting. The findings from this report suggest a closer examination of current practices is warranted with a focus on achieving the stated outcomes the laws were designed to remedy.

This report commemorates the fifth anniversary of the Getting Down to Facts project, which sought to provide a thorough and reliable analysis of the critical challenges facing California’s education system as the necessary basis for an informed discussion of policy changes aimed at improving the performance of California schools and students. The report focuses on the four key issues that received emphasis in the Getting Down to Facts studies: governance, finance, personnel, and data systems.

This study demonstrates, for the first time, that providing all 20% of the nation’s three- and four-year-old children who live in poverty with a high-quality ECD program would have a substantial payoff for governments and taxpayers in the future.

This report examines how local school district funding is allocated in a way that hurts poor and minority students. The four papers include: (1) the history of Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and its comparability provision, (2) the unexpected consequences of the comparability provision in practice, (3) the ways in which Title I might be fixed, and (4) the ways in which those fixes might be implemented with positive results.

This special CEP report highlights findings about the critical element of school climate from case studies of the first year and half of SIG implementation in Maryland, Michigan, and Idaho.

This research seeks to provide policy makers with some hard information on the costs of teacher turnover. The goal is to develop an average dollar cost per vacancy, which could also be converted to a percent of payroll, in order to compare to the rules of thumb mentioned
above.

This paper addresses one key driver of spending variation between schools: shared district resources.

This report analyzes funding inequities in the context of four formulas that determine the amounts and destinations of grants under Title I, Part A. States with small populations and low concentrations of poor children receive radically larger grants on a per-poor-child basis than states with larger populations, including those with substantial rural poverty. Children living in concentrated poverty are poorly served by a labyrinthine funding scheme comprising four separate formulas. This paper exposes the technical considerations that should inform a smarter, fairer approach to funding grants under Title I, Part A

This analysis provides an overview of funding equity by race and poverty concentration across states the funding disparities across the nation and within states. It finds that nationally, the highest poverty districts receive about $1,200 less per student than the lowest poverty districts. The differences are even larger–roughly $2,000 per student–among districts serving the most and the fewest students of color.

Over the past twenty years many reading interventions have been proposed. One of these, “Book Flooding”, proposes that providing an enriched environment in which books are present and readily available can improve reading. Much of the research on this topic has focused on exposing children in the early grades to storybooks. Given the greater importance on reading complex text in meeting new reading standards, this study examines the impact of book flooding of books that stress academic words and technical terms. This quasi-experimental study examines the influence of a book distribution program targeted at enhancing children’s exposure to information books. The research examined whether a flood of information books in early childhood settings could affect growth in language, content-related vocabulary, and concepts of comprehending information text. The study concludes there were no significant effects on student outcomes and that book distribution programs on their own need to be reevaluated if they are to improved student reading performance.

This synthesis is described under the rubric of functional outcome analysis (FOA) and is organized around an examination of classroom resources. Various methods of assessing intervention costs and benefits, as well as their distribution, are described. 

This paper examines school costs in relationship to student outcomes.

This report provides background information on the National School Lunch Program (NSLP), including historical trends and participant characteristics. It also addresses steps being taken to meet challenges facing administrators of the program, including tradeoffs between nutritional quality of foods served, costs, and participation, as well as between program access and program integrity.

This report focuses on three specific challenges that are often encountered when districts–especially small ones–grapple with the costs of serving their highest-need special-education students.

This report analyzes the disparity in funding and resources in K-12 education for children of color and low-income families. It found that millions of students–largely low-income students and students of color–continue to attend segregated and economically isolated schools. State and district school finance systems perpetuate and compound these inequities by providing less money to students with the greatest need.

Governor Brown has proposed a new funding system–known as a weighted pupil formula–that would direct more revenue to California school districts serving many economically disadvantaged students. This report examines the relationship between funding and student disadvantage and addresses questions about converting the current school finance system to a weighted pupil formula.

The authors use research-based "impact modeling" to show how a strategic approach to recruiting and supporting rookie teachers could yield as much as 4.2 extra months of student learning. We provide 5 recommendations for school systems to leverage their investment in structures that provide rookie teachers with both shelter and development.

This document presents the first results of a series of studies on within-district spending patterns. It provides an overview of some early analysis of variations in spending among schools within three unnamed school districts.

This paper focuses on one aspect of district spending ambiguity, namely, differences in per-pupil spending masked by teacher salary cost averaging. 

This article presents an example of how school time was monitored to facilitate a cost analysis of school-wide systems of positive behavior support (PBS). 

A recent large-scale evaluation of Reading Recovery, a supplemental reading program for young struggling readers, supports previous research that found it to be effective.  In a 4 year, federally funded project, almost 3,500 students in 685 schools found that generally students benefitted from the intervention. Students receiving Reading Recovery receive supplemental services in a 1:1 instructional setting for 30 minutes 5 days a week from an instructor trained in Reading Recovery.  In the study reported here, students who received Reading Recovery had effect sizes of .35-.37 relative to a control group across a number of measures of reading.  These represent moderate effect sizes and account for about a 1.5 month increase in skill relative to the control group.  Even though the research supports the efficacy of the intervention, it also raises questions about its efficiency.  The schools that participated in the study served about 5 students and the estimated cost per student has ranged from $2,000-$5,000.  These data raise questions about the wisdom of spending this much money per student for growth of about a month and a half.

This paper examines the issue of education equity by analyzing per-pupil state and local education spending. Using U.S. Department of Education school-level expenditure data that includes real teacher salaries, the paper concludes: (1) Students of color are being shortchanged across the country when compared to their white peers. (2) The traditional explanation–that variation in schools’ per-pupil spending stems almost entirely from different property-tax bases between school districts–is inaccurate as approximately 40 percent of variation in per-pupil spending occurs within school districts. (3) Changing a particular provision of federal education law–closing the so-called comparability loophole–would result in districts making more equitable expenditures on students of color.

This analysis examined the cost effectiveness of research from Stuart Yeh on common sturctural interventions in education. Additionally, The Wing Institute analyzes class-size reduction using Yeh's methods.

This research brief provide an introductory overview of the cost of implementation of SWPBIS, as a school-wide approach to reduce suspensions, compared to the cost of school dropout.

This paper of American United States school finances finds evidence to support the importance of providing equitable funding across school districts. These results have important policy implications and suggest areas for future research.

This report analyzes the inequities of the current school finance models and proposes adoption of a model called Weighted Student Funding. It is a system of school funding based on five principles: (1) Funding should follow the child, on a per-student basis, to the public school that he/she attends; (2) Per-student funding should vary according to the child's need and other relevant circumstances; (3) It should arrive at the school as real dollars (4) These principles for allocating money to schools should apply to all levels; and (5) Funding systems should be simplified and made transparent.

"The Mirage" describes the widely held perception among education leaders that they already know how to help teachers improve, and that they could achieve their goal of great teaching in far more classrooms if they just applied what they knew more widely.

The purpose of this study is to examine the costs of replacing high school principals. 

This study describes a benefit-cost analysis of a comprehensive mentoring program for beginning teachers conducted in a medium-sized California school district.

The authors measure the impact of replacing these principals on school-wide student achievement by measuring the changes in achievement that occurred when principals were replaced, and comparing these changes to achievement in comparison schools within DCPS that kept the same principal

The cost of teacher turnover to schools and school districts has only recently been studied. This research reveals that when high-quality teachers leave the classroom, the effect on both student performance and school and district fiscal operations is significant and deleterious.

If teachers are to have a significant impact on student learning it is necessary for them to be well trained and prepared for the role of teacher.  This report examined the effectiveness of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) and My TeachingPartner Pre-K.  The NBPTS is a professional certification program for teachers that have taught at least three years and can meet the NBPTS standards.  My TeachingPartner Pre-K incorporates multiple media and coaching to prepare early education teachers.  The results of the What Works Clearinghouse review of NBPTS is that it had mixed effects in mathematics in grades 3-8 and no discernable effect on English language arts achievement.  There were no studies that met WWC standards for review so no judgment can be made about its effectiveness.  The results of this review highlight the necessity of evaluating the effectiveness of teacher training programs.  The stakes are very high for the students and families being served by teachers and nationally very large amount of money is spent on training teachers.  It would be nice to know which approaches to teacher professional development are effective and which have no beneficial effect.

This international study examines the impact of teacher performance pay on student math, science, and reading achievement.

This study compares the effect size and return on investment for rapid assessment, between, increased spending, voucher programs, charter schools, and increased accountability.

This article compares the relative cost-effectiveness of the five policies, using best-evidence estimates drawn from available data regarding the effectiveness and costs of rapid assessment, increased spending, voucher programs, charter schools, and accountability, using a conservative methodology for calculating the relative effectiveness of the rapid assessment.

The efficacy of using multidisciplinary teams (MDTs) for special education evaluation and programming is increasingly being questioned. Current research data provide only weak support for the continued use of MDTs.