Here’s a quick summary of a thread I recently posted on both BlueSky and X.
Storytime – for those who want to push some “southern” miracle in public schooling – using Mississippi as their exemplar, and implying “red state” strategies are the policy solution:
First – Mississippi doesn’t catch Massachusetts or New Jersey. NOT EVEN CLOSE
But states like Arizona and Florida fall to and even blow Mississippi in some cases on 8th grade NAEP performance (a better indicator of the cumulative effects of a system on student learning than 4th grade assessments).
Notable in these graphs are the continued large declines in Arizona and Florida while others are stabilizing or rebounding from 2022 to 2024 (AZ stabilizes in math, but not FL).
Unlike Florida or Arizona, Mississippi does not have (or has not during this period) universal vouchers (but does have large private enrollment share).
Mississippi has a very small share of kids in charter schools, whereas charter enrollments (and voucher enrollments) have exploded in Florida and Arizona:
What has Mississippi done? Well, unlike Florida or Arizona, Mississippi has maintained effort to fund its schools and has actually surpassed Florida and Arizona on labor cost adjusted per pupil spending:
AMONG LOW SPENDING STATES (in labor cost adjusted 1999$)
Just some food for thought. And while not a rigorous causal analysis, certainly more rigorous than most of the conversations I’ve seen/heard on this topic.
Bruce Baker is an Professor in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. From 1997 to 2008 he was a professor at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, KS. He is lead author with Preston Green (Penn State University) and Craig Richards (Teachers College, Columbia University) of Financing Education Systems, a graduate level textbook on school finance policy published by Merrill/Prentice-Hall. Professor Baker has written a multitude of peer reviewed research articles on state school finance policy, teacher labor markets, school leadership labor markets 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 (including Weighted Student Funding) for better meeting the needs of students.
Baker, along with Preston Green of Penn State University are co-authors of the chapter on Conceptions of Equity in the recently released Handbook of Research Education Finance and Policy, and co-authors of the chapter on the Politics of Education Finance in the Handbook of Education Politics and Policy and co-authors of the chapter on School Finance in the Handbook of Education Policy of the American Educational Research Association.
Professor Baker has also consulted for state legislatures, boards of education and other organizations on education policy and school finance issues and has testified in state school finance litigation in Kansas, Missouri and Arizona. He is a member of the Think Tank Review Panel, a group of academic researchers who conduct technical reviews of publicly released think tank reports on education policy issues.
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