Resources and Standards in Urban Schools
Abstract
Despite being central to government education policy in many countries, there remains considerable debate about whether resources matter for pupil outcomes. In this paper we look at this question by considering an English education policy initiative - Excellence in Cities - which has been a flagship policy aimed at raising standards in inner-city secondary schools. We report results showing a positive impact of the extra resources on school attendance and performance in Mathematics (though not for English) but, interestingly, there is a marked heterogeneity in the effectiveness of the policy. Its greatest impact has been in more disadvantaged schools and on the performance of middle and high ability students within these schools. A simple cost-benefit calculation suggests the policy to be cost-effective. We conclude that additional resources can matter for children in the poorest secondary schools, particularly when building on a solid educational or ability background. However, small changes in resources have little or no effect on the 'hard to reach' children who have not achieved a sufficiently strong prior level.Download Info
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Paper provided by Centre for the Economics of Education, LSE in its series CEE Discussion Papers with number 0076.Length:
Date of creation: Feb 2007
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:cep:ceedps:0076
Contact details of provider:
Web page: http://cee.lse.ac.uk/publications.htm
Related research
Keywords: Education; Resources; Evaluation; Disadvantage;Other versions of this item:
- Stephen Machin & Sandra McNally & Costas Meghir, 2010. "Resources and Standards in Urban Schools," Journal of Human Capital, University of Chicago Press, vol. 4(4), pages 365 - 393.
- Machin, Stephen & McNally, Sandra & Meghir, Costas, 2007. "Resources and Standards in Urban Schools," IZA Discussion Papers 2653, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA).
- I21 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Analysis of Education
- H52 - Public Economics - - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies - - - Government Expenditures and Education
- C52 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric Modeling - - - Model Evaluation, Validation, and Selection
References
References listed on IDEASPlease report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
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Citations
Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.Cited by:
- Stephen Gibbons & Sandra McNally & Martina Viarengo, 2011.
"Does Additional Spending Help Urban Schools? An Evaluation Using Boundary Discontinuities,"
CEE Discussion Papers
0128, Centre for the Economics of Education, LSE.
- Stephen Gibbons & Sandra McNally & Martina Viarengo, 2011. "Does Additional Spending Help Urban Schools? An Evaluation Using Boundary Discontinuities," SERC Discussion Papers 0090, Spatial Economics Research Centre, LSE.
- Gibbons, Steve & McNally, Sandra & Viarengo, Martina, 2012. "Does Additional Spending Help Urban Schools? An Evaluation Using Boundary Discontinuities," IZA Discussion Papers 6281, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA).
- Rodríguez-Planas, Núria, 2010. "Longer-Term Impacts of Mentoring, Educational Services, and Incentives to Learn: Evidence from a Randomized Trial," IZA Discussion Papers 4754, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA).
- J Taylor & Steve Bradley & G Migali, 2009. "The distributional impact of increased school resources: the Specialist Schools Initiative and the Excellence in Cities Programme," Working Papers 602528, Lancaster University Management School, Economics Department.
- Monique De Haan, 2012. "The Effect of Additional Funds for Low-Ability Pupils - A Nonparametric Bounds Analysis," CESifo Working Paper Series 3993, CESifo Group Munich.
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