While actual decisions about education spending have varied considerably from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, in many places, the per pupil allotment for education has decreased substantially over the last decades, independent of economic indicators. By the beginning of the 1980s, a few studies and books began to appear which challenged the Coleman conclusions. The first and perhaps most influential was Michael Rutter's Fifteen Thousand Hours . Rutter and his colleagues compared a number of secondary schools in the same disadvantaged neighbourhoods in London, and were able to show that, even though the students were coming from the same kinds of homes and streets, how much they learned during their years in secondary school was strongly associated with the school they attended. In some schools, students made far greater academic progress than in others.
Schools do make a difference, the Rutter study said, for better or for worse.
As this work was read and digested, it helped to create a renewal of interest in schools as agencies of positive change, places where young people, even without significant advantages of background, benefit from teachers who are well-prepared and dedicated, and administrators who are committed to their task. More emphasis came to be placed, in educational journals and meetings, on strategies for improvement of schools. Many of the reforms, first discussed then, continue to be more talked about than implemented. And, through all kinds of economic trends, upward and down, the issue of educational costs remained paramount. In the last decade, there has been increasing attention to what are called educational productivity function studies, which are simply studies of educational inputs and outputs, with cost-benefit analysis applied.