Does Money Matter in Education? Second Edition

This second edition policy brief revisits the long and storied literature on whether money matters in providing a quality education. It includes research released since the original brief in 2012 and covers a handful of additional topics. Increasingly, political rhetoric adheres to the unfounded certainty that money does not make a difference in education, and that reduced funding is unlikely to harm educational quality. Such proclamations have even been used to justify large cuts to education budgets over the past few years. These positions, however, have little basis in the empirical research on the relationship between funding and school quality. In the following brief, the author discusses major studies on three specific topics: (1) whether how much money schools spend matters; (2) whether specific schooling resources that cost money matter; and (3) whether substantive and sustained state school finance reforms matter. Regarding these three questions, the author concludes: (1) Does money matter? Yes; (2) Do state school finance reforms matter? Yes; and (3) Do schooling resources that cost money matter? Yes. The following is appended: Methods and Measures in Money Matters Questions. [For the first edition "Revisiting the Age-Old Question: Does Money Matter in Education?," see ED528632.]