A recent report finds that American students rank toward the bottom or the middle in international tests of achievement in math, science, and other subjects. Surprisingly, American class sizes are much smaller.
Recent evidence suggests that increased spending alone is unlikely to fix American schools.
But over the same period high school students' scores on the SAT test began to decline and even today SAT scores have not recovered to their levels in the mid 1960's. Statistical studies of the impact of spending per pupil, class size, teacher education and teacher experience often find no significant link between these measures of school resources and students' achievement on standardized tests. The evidence is mixed. Historical studies that examine workers born in the first half of the century tend to find weak correlations between school resources at the state level and graduates' earnings. Several papers by myself and others have examined this question more directly, by testing for a link between earnings of workers educated between 1960 and 1980 and resources at the individual school they attended.