ruce Baker is a professor in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers in New Jersey and is widely recognized as a leading scholar in the field of education finance. Serving in both academic and professional capacities, he has authored a multitude of peer-reviewed journal articles, policy briefs, editorials, books and reports on topics including state school finance policy, teacher and administrator labor markets and preparation pipelines, charter school funding, and higher education finance and policy.

His recent work has focused on measuring cost variations associated with schooling contexts and student population characteristics, including ways to better design state school finance policies and local district allocation formulas for better meeting the needs of students.

My areas of study include state school finance systems, the financing of public, charter and private schools, and how school funding intersects with such things as teacher labor markets, and ultimately, student outcomes.

Many older school funding studies simply lacked the richness and precision of data that we have at our fingertips these days. The best ways to study the effect of school finance reforms and infusions of resources on student short- and longer-term outcomes is to have available, long-time series on all of the necessary measures. There were, from the 1990s and earlier 2000s, several state specific studies in Massachusetts, Michigan, Kansas and elsewhere that revealed positive effects of school finance reforms on student outcomes, using longitudinal district level data. Many much- earlier studies simply lacked the necessary time frame to capture the effects of reforms and lack sufficiently detailed information on student characteristics and student outcomes. More recent studies have been able to take advantage of national panels of data running over several decades, and linking district level spending data, detailed student demographic data and normalized outcome measures to determine the effects of school finance reforms across state contexts and across districts within states. It’s only in recent years that these data have been sufficient to this task, which is why we are now seeing a flurry of confirmatory studies.

It may be less about student data per se, and more about the accumulation of longer-term data sets with more comparable and more complete measures over time. With school finance reforms occurring at different times in different states, the key is having enough years of data in the “before” and “after” periods to be able to see whether, and to what extent, reforms have led to improvements in student outcomes.

A separate and substantial body of research validates that to achieve any set of common outcome goals, it costs more (per pupil) in higher poverty settings than in lower poverty settings. Similarly, it costs more where there are more English language learners, more children with disabilities, very small schools in sparsely populated areas, or where labor costs (of hiring comparably skilled teachers) are higher. All of these factors matter and should be accounted for in state school finance systems, ideally based on rigorous empirical analysis of how each factor affects the costs of achieving some common outcome goal or set of goals. When it comes to student needs, such as child poverty concentration, where that additional money is leveraged to improve outcomes is relatively straightforward. It takes smaller classes to achieve similar outcome goals in higher poverty settings. It may take higher teacher wages to recruit and retain similar quality teachers in those settings. Those costs add up; in fact, they multiply. More teachers (for smaller classes) at a higher wage per teacher leads to higher per-pupil costs. Again, where the goal is to provide children in higher poverty settings equal opportunity with their peers in lower poverty settings to achieve desired outcomes.

Among the recent longitudinal studies that have revealed the positive effects on student outcomes of the infusion of funds through school finance reforms are a few additional studies that also show that what goes up can also go down. That is, studies which have shown that the recessionary cuts to state school finance systems have led to reductions in student outcomes, linked to increases in class sizes and less competitive teacher wages.

It can be especially hard for schools with limited financial resources to boost student achievement, especially in high-poverty settings. It all comes down to that tradeoff between the competitiveness of wages and the staffing ratios, and/or class sizes. The best first step is to evaluate the districts position relative to surrounding districts on both of those measures. Los Angeles Unified School District, for example, has relatively competitive — though not competitive enough for their context — wages, but in many cases, huge class sizes. I would argue that the additional dollar there should likely go first toward reducing class sizes. But the reality is that LAUSD needs more total resources, because it’s both/and, not an either/or deal. If your wages aren’t competitive enough, you can’t trade them off for smaller classes. Similarly, if your class sizes are only OK, but still not sufficient, you’d have to make them less than OK to make wages more competitive. That just doesn’t work. To those who would opine that it matters more how the education dollar is spend than how much, I often say “but if you don’t have it, you can’t spend it!”

LCFF adopts the basic structure of a rational state school finance formula. The basic pieces needed for calculating and setting a floor or foundation level of funding, and weights for adjusting for student needs. But like even the most elaborate car, LCFF needs fuel — funding — if it’s going to get the children of the state anywhere. California has a very long way to go in scaling up the funding levels necessary for California schoolchildren to approach even national average outcomes. So, while the structure of LCFF is pretty good, and it has been accompanied by modest new investment — it’s only a start. There’s a long way to go.

The state, in providing a sufficient scale up of funding, certainly has interest in measuring the outcomes — preferably a broad variety of outcomes — achieved with that funding. But it’s my view that rather than incentives and penalties based on those measures, states should engage in more rigorous modeling of the relationships between schools, resources, students and outcomes in order to develop a better understanding of what works and how to provide positive, productive guidance to local officials based on those findings. Sticks, carrots, closures and turnarounds are often disruptive, counterproductive and ultimately corrupt the usefulness of otherwise informative measures.