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Targeted school funding is a potentially valuable policy lever to increase educational equality by race, ethnicity, and income, but it remains unclear how to target funds most effectively. We use a regression discontinuity approach to compare districts that narrowly passed or failed a school funding election. We use close tax elections in 9 states to identify effects of operating funds and close bond elections in 8 states to identify effects of capital funds. Results indicate positive achievement returns to spending, especially for math achievement and for operating funds. We find similar returns to spending by race, ethnicity, and income (not statistically different), but we find significantly larger returns for students in low-resource districts than in high-resource districts, including larger returns for Black, Latinx, and low-income students. Mediation analyses suggest spending on teacher salaries and counselors may be particularly effective mechanisms to increase achievement among Black and low-income students. [Additional funding for this report was provided by the Gilead Foundation Creating Possible Fund and the Population Studies and Training Center at Brown University.]

The academic and economic benefits of school spending are well-established, but focusing on these outcomes may underestimate the full social benefits of school spending. Recent increases in U.S. child mortality are driven by injuries and raise questions about what types of social investments could reduce child deaths. We use close school district tax elections and negative binomial regression models to estimate effects of a quasi-random increase in school spending on county child mortality. We find consistent evidence that increased school spending from passing a tax election reduces child mortality. Districts that narrowly passed a proposed tax increase spent an additional $243 per pupil, mostly on instruction and salaries, and had 4% lower child mortality after spending increased (6-10 years after the election). This increased spending also reduced child deaths of despair (due to drugs, alcohol, or suicide) by 5% and child deaths due to accidents or motor vehicle accidents by 7%. Estimates predicting potential mechanisms suggest that lower child mortality could partly reflect increases in the number of teachers and counselors, higher teacher salaries, and improved student engagement. [Funding for this report was provided by the Gilead Foundation Creating Possible Fund and the Population Studies and Training Center at Brown University.]

Decisions about who is in charge of school systems often make the news. High-profile cases such as the recent takeover of the Houston Independent School District by the State of Texas -- where one of the first steps by state leaders was to replace the superintendent -- highlight the central importance of district leadership as well as the public perception of superintendents as critical contributors to the quality of a school system. Yet decision-makers who want to rely on research-based evidence about who to select or even how to conceptualize the characteristics required to be successful as superintendents have relatively little to draw on in the education research literature. In the spring of 2023, The Broad Center at the Yale School of Management partnered with the Annenberg Institute at Brown University to bring together a group of scholars who have made recent contributions to research on superintendency and to educational leadership more broadly. These conversations resulted in a strong consensus on the need for a renewed push to build knowledge around specific aspects of the superintendency, anchored in new data that broaden the research that is possible in the field. Future research, in particular, could inform the field by investigating superintendents' roles, including their time use, decision-making, priorities, management styles, and behaviors; the routes to the superintendency and factors associated with retention; how and why superintendents improve; and the causal impact of superintendents on key outcomes. [This report was co-produced by The Broad Center at Yale School of Management.]