When school budgets were cut during the Great Recession, what happened to the pupils?
cut education budgets in the hope of forcing schools to become more efficient. Given the difficulty of measuring the effects of education spending on test scores, it can be hard to know whether this is as bad an idea as, at first glance, it might seem to be. Yet America ran a large, albeit unintended, experiment along these lines in 2007-09, when school budgets were cut during the recession.
According to a study by Kirabo Jackson of Northwestern University and his colleagues, recession-era budget cuts did lead to lower maths and reading scores. Imagine that a school district replaced all its average teachers with near-bottom-quality teachers. Mr Jackson says that the recession had a similar effect on pupil scores. The researchers also found that the budget cuts during the recession reduced graduation rates.
Since children from racial minorities disproportionately attend low-income schools, they endured the brunt of the consequences. Test scores in poor and minority school districts suffered most, according to Kenneth Shores of Pennsylvania State University and Matthew Steinberg of the University of Pennsylvania. The schools hit hardest by budget cuts were already struggling academically and financially.
One of the most noticeable effects was on class size. William N. Evans of Notre Dame University and his co-authors found that nearly 300,000 school personnel, mostly teachers, lost their jobs as a result of the recession. Salaries and employee benefits make up approximately 80% of school expenditures per pupil, so they are often the first cuts made when budgets tighten. Small class sizes improve test scores, future college attendance and future job quality.
According to the Centre on Budget and Policy Priorities, a think-tank, 29 states had not returned to pre-recession funding levels by 2015. Rebecca Sibilia of EdBuild, a non-profit organisation that advocates more equal funding for schools, reckons that funding cuts during the recession provide one of the clearest examples of how current school-funding formulas have a detrimental effect on the children who need most help.
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