Intradistrict equity of public education resources and performance

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Abstract

This paper presents empirical evidence on input and output equity of expenditures, teacher resources, and performance across 840 elementary and middle schools in New York City. Historically, researchers have studied interdistrict distributions, but given the large numbers of pupils and schools within many urban districts, it is important to learn about intradistrict distributions as well. The empirical work is built on a framework of horizontal, vertical, and equal opportunity equity. The results show that the horizontal equity distributions are more disparate than what would be expected relative to results of other studies, vertical equity is lacking, especially in elementary schools, and equality of opportunity is at best neutral but more often absent. Middle schools exhibit more equity than elementary schools. The paper is one of the first to measure output equity, using levels and changes in test scores to do so.

Introduction

Most US states organize their K-12 school system into a large number of districts that vary greatly with respect to enrollment and numbers of schools.2 While data on resources and performance across districts are generally plentiful, such information within districts is scarce. This lack of intradistrict resource and performance data is a significant shortcoming considering that large urban districts account for a sizable proportion of students, education spending, and low performing schools in many states.3

Until recently researchers interested in school finance equity have relied on district-level data and analyses, focusing primarily on the relationship between fiscal capacity and educational needs on the one hand and resources on the other hand. They find that inter-district resource disparities within states decreased from the 1980s to the 1990s, but between-state differences in per-pupil resources remained large, and relative rankings of states changed little (Hussar and Sonnenberg, 2000, Parrish and Hikido, 1998, Wyckoff, 1992). Rubenstein and Moser (2002) find that the distribution of resources is more equal in states with fewer districts relative to students and in states with higher proportions of revenues provided by state governments, while Evans, Murray and Schwab (1997) and Murray, Evans and Schwab (1998) show that court ordered education finance reforms have contributed to decreases in dispersions in the states where they took place by increasing spending in poor relative to less poor districts.

With the advent of school-level resource data in the early 1990s, researchers have been able to analyze school-level resource distributions, often ignoring district boundaries and using all schools in a state. These school-level analyses reveal wide disparities (Betts, Reuben and Dannenberg, 2000, Burke, 1999, Hertert, 1996, Nakib, 1996, Owens and Maiden, 1999, Schwartz, 1999). Researchers focusing on school-level data within large urban districts find significant disparities in resources and in some cases in the relationship between resources and poverty (Berne and Stiefel, 1994, Rubenstein, 1998, Stiefel, Rubenstein and Berne, 1998).

School finance equity researchers often focus exclusively on the input or resource side of the educational process, ignoring issues of output equity. A notable exception is the volume edited by Berne and Picus (1994), which consists of 12 papers all devoted to exploring ways to analyze output equity. In more recent years, the attention of state courts to the goal of adequacy in school finance has led economists such as Reschovsky and Imazeki (1998) and Duncombe and Yinger (2000) to estimate district cost functions that can be used to predict the amount of resources needed to produce adequate outcomes. Even with these adequacy studies, however, little has been documented on the distribution of outputs within large urban areas.

This paper adds to our knowledge by analyzing the distribution of resources and performance across New York City elementary and middle schools.4 Particularly notable is our inclusion of performance measures along with traditional measures of spending and resources. The paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we develop a conceptual framework for measuring intradistrict equity, while in Section 3 we describe the data and variables. In Section 4, we present empirical results and in Section 5 we conclude.

Section snippets

Measuring equity in intradistrict resource allocation and performance

While there are a variety of ways to conceptualize and measure intradistrict equity in school financing, here we adapt Berne and Stiefel’s (1984) interdistrict framework in which three equity concepts are analyzed: horizontal equity, vertical equity, and equal opportunity. Horizontal equity specifies that equally situated students should be treated equally and, therefore, in our analyses of spending, we study general education operating revenue, separating it from categorical revenue, which is

Data and variables

Our analyses use three sources of data published by the New York City Board of Education (BOE): School Based Expenditure Reports, Fiscal Year 1997–98; Annual School Reports, 1997–98; and CTB Reading Tests By Quartile. All spending is coded by source of funds, by function, and by student type. In the analyses, we report school-level distributions and regressions by the instructional level, elementary or middle as classified by the BOE, which results in approximately 660 elementary schools and

Input equity

Table 2 displays horizontal equity results. In order to assess what these numbers say about how equitable spending and resources are in New York City, a comparative perspective is essential, since there is no absolute answer to the question, “what is fair and equitable?” Several kinds of comparisons are possible: to studies of interdistrict distributions in various years across the states (Hertert, Busch and Odden, 1994, Hussar and Sonnenberg, 2000, Wyckoff, 1992), to studies of intracity

Conclusions

Spending per pupil is horizontally inequitable at both the elementary and middle school levels (coefficients of variation greater than 0.10), vertically inequitable at the elementary level (negative coefficient on percent free lunch), and inequitable for equal opportunity at the elementary level (negative coefficient on percent nonwhite and outer districts). Especially important are the vertical equity and equal opportunity results for elementary schools, results that are not replicated for

Acknowledgements

This paper benefited significantly from comments by Ingrid Gould Ellen, Norm Fruchter, Amy Ellen Schwartz, and two anonymous referees. The financial support of the Robin Hood Foundation is gratefully acknowledged. The views expressed and results are those of the authors alone.

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