"...Coleman found that variations in per-pupil expenditure had little correlation with student outcomes. Although this was one of the key findings of the report, little attention was paid to this inconvenient fact. At the time, the Johnson administration was trumpeting a federally funded compensatory education program that was supposed to equalize educational opportunity by concentrating more funding on students living in low-income neighborhoods. But the finding gradually assumed greater importance in policy debates, as extensive subsequent research engendered by the Coleman Report reinforced this conclusion.
"A defining moment came in the 1970s, when the California Supreme Court in Serrano v. Priest decided that in order to ensure equal educational opportunity for all children, all school districts in California must spend equal amounts per pupil, instigating a wave of school-finance court cases across the country. If expenditures must be equal in order for opportunity to be equal, then the amount spent per pupil must be critically important to student learning. Despite the Coleman findings, the claim that money matters was routinely made in courtrooms in nearly every state, provoking a bevy of research on the effects of school expenditure on student achievement. This is not the place to explore a debate that has relied on a mixture of scientific evidence, professional punditry, and misleading claims. Given the fiscal stakes involved, it is hardly surprising that the conversations have been politically charged and have led to an ongoing battle under the misleading sobriquet “money doesn’t matter...."
http://educationnext.org/what-matters-for-student-achievement/?utm_source=Hoover+Daily+Report&utm_campaign=5b5a41e166-New_HDR_Live_8_17_158_17_2015&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_21b1edff3c-5b5a41e166-72527561
AMAZON BOOKS a.co/6S174Ka
Federal entitlement programs are strewn throughout the pages of U.S. history, springing from the noble purpose of assisting people who are destitute through no fault of their own. Yet as federal entitlement programs have grown, so too have their inefficiency and their cost. Neither tax revenues nor revenues generated by the national economy have been able to keep pace with their rising growth, bringing the national debt to a record peacetime level.
The High Cost of Good Intentions is the first comprehensive history of these federal entitlement programs. Combining economics, history, political science, and law, John F. Cogan reveals how the creation of entitlements brings forth a steady march of liberalizing forces that cause entitlement programs to expand. This process―as visible in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as in the present day―is repeated until benefits are extended to nearly all who could be considered eligible, and in turn establishes a new base for future expansions. His work provides a unifying explanation for the evolutionary path that nearly all federal entitlement programs have followed over the past two hundred years, tracing both their shared past and the financial risks they pose for future generations.