Do You Get What You Pay For?

Edudiva notices that there’s no clear link between district spending and low-income students’ achievement:

There is no correlation between per pupil spending in a district and the percent of free or reduced lunch students who test proficient or advanced on the math MAP test.

One conclusion we should not draw from these results is that spending doesn’t matter. Of course spending matters! But it’s not a simple question of more or less spending. Who spends the money, and how wisely they spend it, are more important than the exact dollar value. When you compare districts that face the same incentives and are run in much the same way, spending doesn’t make a big difference.