According to the study, spending money on lowering pupil-teacher ratios in the lower grades, providing widely available prekindergarten programs, and providing teachers with discretionary resources for the classroom are better uses of education dollars, particularly in states with disproportionately high numbers of minority and disadvantaged children. RAND, a nonprofit institution headquartered in Santa Monica, California, conducts research and analysis to help improve public policy. The main message of the report is that public education is reformable and reform efforts have made a difference. U.S. Education Secretary Richard W. Riley said the report highlights the areas the Clinton administration has focused on to improve education. More federal funding is needed, Grissmer told Education World.
Some states are limited in what they can spend.
This is a federal problem. Title I is a federally funded program that provides additional funds to schools with low-income students. For example, Texas and California are close demographically but had very different test results. Texas outscored California in reading and math by 11 percentage points. The report attributes lower pupil-teacher ratios, more prekindergarten, and better teaching resources as the primary reasons Texas students performed so much better than California students did.