Three Essays on Resources in Education.

The first chapter of this dissertation examines how a large increase to state aid to schools in New Jersey affects the expenditures of the affected school districts. The 30 school districts affected by the Abbott policy received a 10% boost to school budgets following a court ruling. Using the funding induced by the court ruling as an instrument for state aid to school districts, I measure the uses of increased state aid. In specifications that control for unobserved differences across districts, I find that 60-70% of the increased funding passes through to increased school expenditures and that the rest is used to reduce local contributions to school revenues in Abbott districts relative to comparison districts. This funding went largely to instructional purposes, paying for increased hiring of teachers and support services personnel. The second chapter looks at the achievement effects of the expenditure changes examined in chapter 1. Using restricted student-level test scores for New Jersey's 11th grade assessment, I find that the policy improved math and reading scores of minority students by 0.2-0.25 standard deviations. Trends in scores at earlier grades also show shrinking achievement gaps. The third chapter, written with James Sallee and Paul Courant, develops a simple model for allocating students and resources to schools in a system of higher education. Starting with a distribution of student ability and a fixed quantity of resources we show that only a few assumptions are required to lead to a tiered higher education system that sorts students by ability. Our assumptions, that student ability and school resources are complementary and that there is a fixed cost to establishing a school, lead to a tiered system even without peer effects.PhDPublic Policy & EconomicsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/61592/1/aresch_1.pd

Abbott and Bacon Districts: Education Finances During the Great Recession

In the State of New Jersey, any child between the age of five and eighteen has the constitutional right to a thorough and efficient education. The State of New Jersey also has one of the country's most rigid policies regarding a balanced budget come fiscal end. When state and local revenues took a big hit in the most recent recession, officials had to make tough decisions about education spending. This paper exploits rich panel data and trend-shift analysis to analyze how school finances in the Abbott and Bacon School Districts, as well as the high-poverty districts in general, were affected during the Great Recession and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) federal stimulus period. For these groups of districts, the debate over the meaning of thorough and efficient has become a perennial courtroom discussion. Our analysis shows downward shifts in revenue and expenditure per pupil during the post-recession era in all three groups of districts. However, the Abbott Districts showed the sharpest declines in both revenue and expenditure relative to preexisting trends. Of importance, the Abbott Districts were the only group in our analysis to show statistically significant negative shifts in instructional expenditure (the expenditure category most closely related to student learning), even with the federal stimulus. Declines in noninstructional categories were also the most prominent in the Abbott Districts. With comparably less declines in state and federal aid, the Bacon Districts maintained spending across the board at higher levels than the other groups. Given the unique role of the Abbott and Bacon Districts in the history of New Jersey education policy, the findings of this paper contribute valuable insight regarding the experience of these high-poverty districts during recessions

On the Optimal Allocation of Students and Resources in a System of Higher Education

We model the social planner's decision to establish universities and populate them with students and resources, given a distribution of student ability and a limited pool of resources for higher education. If student ability and school resources are complements, and if there is a fixed cost to establishing a school, then the optimal allocation will involve a tiered system of higher education that sorts students by ability. In contrast to previous research, we show this tiered system is optimal even in the absence of peer effects. In considering where to locate students, the planner balances the benefit of providing students with more resources against the congestion costs of overcrowding schools. Nearly identical students who are close to the margin of entry to a higher or lower tier will experience discrete gaps in education quality. In considering how many universities to establish, the planner will balance the value of more precise tailoring against the cost of establishing additional schools. The planner's inability to perfectly tailor education quality will result in both winners and losers. Our model also makes predictions about how university systems that serve different populations should vary. Larger systems will produce more per dollar of expenditures and more education per student, due to economies of scale.

Is There "White Flight" Into Private Schools? Evidence From The National Educational Longitudinal Survey

Using a recently released confidential data set from the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES), we find some evidence of "white flight" from public schools into private schools partly in response to minority schoolchildren. We also examine whether white flight is from all minorities or only from certain minority groups, delineated by race or income. We find that white families are fleeing public schools with large concentrations of poor minority schoolchildren. In addition, the clearest flight appears to occur from poor black schoolchildren. The results for white flight from Asians and Hispanics are less clear. © 2002 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology