School Spending and Student Outcomes: Evidence from Robin Hood and Tax Abatements. Policy Brief

This project attempted to answer the following question: what are the impacts of school spending on student outcomes? The Texas education system provides a unique opportunity to examine this question and make a large and significant contribution to the school finance literature. Over the last two decades, Texas made two large changes to school finance: Chapter 41 of the Education Code, introduced in 1993, and Chapter 313 of the Texas Tax Code, introduced in 2001. Chapter 41, commonly known as the Robin Hood redistribution program, was appropriately titled, as it sought to equalize spending between school districts by the state transferring funds from wealthier districts to poorer districts. Chapter 313 is a transfer program that facilitates large increases to a school district's revenues generated from property taxes. The empirical strategy used in this project was based on a quasi-experimental methodology utilizing traditional regression approaches. Specifically, the authors looked to evaluate the causal impact of the policies by comparing the outcomes of an unaffected control group to a treated group. Unfortunately, this research was unable to provide any answers to the research questions the authors set out to answer. This is due to several unforeseen flaws with the empirical strategies that proved to be too difficult to overcome.