Can Judges Improve Academic Achievement?

Abstract

Over the last 3 decades student achievement has remained essentially unchanged in the United States, but not for a lack of spending. Over the same period a myriad of education reforms have been suggested and per-pupil spending has more than doubled. Since the 1990s the education reform attempts have frequently included judicial decisions to revise state school finance systems. Invoking general clauses about the need for an adequate education found in every state constitution, judges in more than half of the states waded into the development of finely tuned reform strategies. This article empirically estimates the effect of judicial intervention on student achievement using standardized test scores and graduation rates in 48 states from 1992 to 2005. We find no evidence that court-ordered school spending improves student achievement.

Notes

¹See, for example, West and Peterson (2007) and the article in this issue by Costrell, Loeb, and Hanushek.

²Ideally we would use the standard deviation of the population, but we had access only to standard errors with NAEP data. Note that the standard error is the standard deviation divided by the square root of the sample size, and we know the population and percentage of the population consisting of school-age kids. For robustness we created a quasi-standard deviation by assuming kids are evenly distributed among the grades within a state and that NAEP samples the same percentage of kids in a state from year to year. This quasi-measure will be the actual standard deviation divided by the square root of the sampling percentage. Because all the models we estimate include state fixed effects, the square root of the sampling percentage will disappear as long as it is “fixed” for each state. When we ran the analyses using this quasi-measure we found qualitatively similar results. For transparency, we report the coefficient estimates when using the standard errors as the dependent variable.

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