Not All Dollars Are Equal: The Composition of School Spending and Student Outcomes

This paper analyzes the association between the composition of school spending and various measures of school effectiveness. Using audited financial accounts for the universe of publicly funded urban schools in Chile between 2015 and 2022, disaggregated into six expenditure categories and 37 subcategories, we link spending patterns to school value-added measures of test scores, attendance, chronic absenteeism, and dropout. Aggregate spending per student is only weakly associated with school effectiveness. In contrast, spending composition matters substantially: we reject equal associations across expenditure categories for all outcomes, and no category is associated with all four dimensions of effectiveness. Personnel spending is associated with higher test-score value added but not attendance, whereas operations spending is associated with higher attendance and lower chronic absenteeism but not with test score gains. Infrastructure spending is associated with both learning and attendance outcomes. We also find considerable heterogeneity across school types and student populations. The categories prioritized by Chiles targeted equity subsidy, quality programs and student well-being, are associated with higher test-score value added primarily in the most disadvantaged schools, while operations and infrastructure expenditures exhibit opposite associations in public and private voucher schools. The estimated associations are modest in magnitude: a one-standard-deviation increase in the most predictive spending categories corresponds to 2 to 7 percent of the crossschool dispersion in value added. Nevertheless, the findings have important policy implications because education funding policies typically target specific expenditure categories rather than overall spending levels. Overall, the results suggest that the composition of spending is more informative than expenditure levels alone and that evaluating education finance policies using a single outcome or pooled estimates can understate the benefits of targeted investments.