More on Prof. Garen's K to 12 Education Research - Funding grew MUCH faster than test results

I wrote yesterday about what UK’s Dr. John Garen, a member of the Bluegrass Institute’s Board of Scholars, has to say regarding increases in K to 12 Education funding in Kentucky. The graph in that first blog, which came from Dr. Garen’s new report, The Institute for the Study of Free Enterprise Working Paper Number 36, made it clear that education funding in the Bluegrass State has risen significantly – by 80% – even after the impacts of inflation are removed and we only talk about real funding increases.

So, what have we gotten for that really notable increase in taxpayer support for our schools?

Dr. Garen answers that question by examining changes in Kentucky’s testing results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) versus that change in funding we discussed earlier. He does that with Figure 3 in his report, which I show below along with some added comments.

Dr. Garen uses an interesting approach here. The various changes are shown as proportional increases. For example, the increased funding as of 2019 of 80% is shown as an index value of 1.80. The relative increases in the NAEP scores are shown in a similar way. So, the very small, 0.3% increase in the NAEP Grade 8 Reading score is shown as 1.003. By using this index approach, Dr. Garen can show us the relative changes in these two different types of data, scores and funding, using a common scale on a single graph.

And, the differences are quite apparent. As you can see, the notable, rise in real education funding in Kentucky, shown by the dashed blue line, has not been matched by any notable score changes on the NAEP.

The state’s best NAEP performance increase was for NAEP Grade 4 Math, shown by the dashed gray line, where the NAEP Scale Score Kentucky earned in 2019 was just 11.1% better than the score way back in 1992. Got that? An 80% funding increase only resulted in an 11.1% performance increase for Kentucky’s fourth graders.

But, it gets worse.

In the case of Grade 8 Reading, shown by the dashed yellow line, there’s been scant improvement looking back all the way to 1998, the first time this grade was tested for reading by the NAEP.

Also, while it is hard to see because the overall changes in Grade 8 NAEP reading are so small, the Grade 8 NAEP Reading performance has actually been in a decay recently. The Bluegrass State posted a NAEP Grade 8 Reading Scale Score of 270 back in 2013 but more recently the score decayed back to just 263 as of 2019. By the way, a little work with the NAEP Data Explorer shows that was a statistically significant decline in Grade 8 reading. In other words, this is a real decline since 2013 and isn’t just due to statistical sampling issues with NAEP scores.

So, as Dr. Garen shows, it’s clear Kentucky hasn’t gotten anything like commensurate “bang” for its considerable increase in education “bucks.”

Dr. Garen’s paper has a lot more information and is well worth your time. We’ll be doing more blogs about the paper as well, so stay tuned.

John Garen, Ph.D., is the BB&T Professor of Economics in the Gatton College of Business and Economics at the University of Kentucky. He has extensive experience with economic research including research in the K to 12 education area.