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"This post is taken from a forthcoming report in which I summarize literature related to state school finance reforms and explore relationships between changing distributions of funding and distributions of tangible classroom level resources. The newly released Jackson, Johnson and Persico NBER paper speaks to similar issues and is included in the discussion that follows"

"Improving education is not simple because the human beings who inhabit schools, their relationship with one another and the social system in which they live are complex and varied. While simple solutions to complex problems always fall short, the elements of effective systemic solutions in education are not so hard to imagine. In fact, they are well known."

"Our findings are consistent with research that finds models including student background and classroom characteristics are highly correlated with simpler specifications that only include a single-subject lagged test score, while value-added models estimated with school or student fixed effects have a lower correlation. Interestingly, teacher effectiveness estimates based on median student growth percentiles are highly correlated with estimates from VAMs that include only a lagged test score and those that also include lagged scores and student background characteristics, despite the fact that the two methods for estimating teacher effectiveness are, at least conceptually, quite different. However, even when the correlations between job performance estimates generated by different models are quite high, differences in the composition of students in teachers' classrooms can have sizable effects on the differences in their effectiveness estimates."