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Follow the Money: School Spending from Title I to Adult Earnings
Johnson, Rucker C. (2015). “Follow the Money: School Spending from Title I to Adult Earnings”. Edited volume, ESEA at 50, The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences.
Abstract
Title I funding has been the largest federal program of K-12 education for the past 50 years with the objective to eliminate the educational disadvantage associated with poverty. I provide new evidence on the long-term effects of school spending from Title I on children's educational and adult economic outcomes. To study effects of Title I, I link school district spending and administrative data on Title I funding to nationally-representative data on children born between 1950 and 1977 and followed through 2011. Models include controls for birth cohort and school district fixed effects, childhood family and neighborhood characteristics, and other policies. I find that increases in Title I funding are significantly related to increases in educational attainment, high school graduation rates, higher earnings and work hours, reductions in grade repetition, school suspension/expulsion, incarceration, and reductions in the annual incidence of poverty in adulthood; effects on educational outcomes are more pronounced for poor children.