 Thank you all for joining us today to this webinar. Some of you are still coming on. Our topic today is does money matter? Money matters. Research evidence supporting greater investments in pre-K to 12 public education. I am David Chiarra. I'm the Executive Director of Education Law Center and I am the moderator for today's event. Just want to mention that this event has three sponsors. Our friends at ETS, the Learning Policy Institute, and my organization, Education Law Center. We want to start today. I want to start with welcoming remarks from Amit Savak, President and CEO of ETS. Amit is a leading voice in education across the world. He was appointed to take the helm at ETS in June and we are thrilled to have Amit as a partner. Amit, take it away. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here, David. It's great to see you as well. Thank you for making this happen. My name is Amit Savak. Since June, I've served as President and CEO of ETS. Access to education is a passion for me. You might even say it's in my DNA. Both of my grandfathers were pre-K to the 12 teachers. My father came to the U.S. from India to pursue education. I grew up surrounded by books and benefited from terrific teachers in the Chicago area of public schools. I've dedicated my career to education. In my view, every dollar that goes to support pre-K12 is a dollar well spent, especially when it's measured. And of course, as part of ETS, that's in our DNA as well, measurement in education. We already know the opportunity here. This webinar will give us the data to back it up. So it's a privilege, both from ETS and for me personally, to co-host this event alongside two extraordinary partners, the Learning Policy Institute and the Education Law Center. Special thanks to David of ELC for moderating the discussion. David, as you know, we cherish our friendship with ELC for many years and hope it will continue long into the future. This conversation is taking place at a crucial moment for education in the United States and for the world. We face two major crises I'd like to raise today. One is a crisis of equity. We are reckoning with historic injustices, even as social divisions deepen. The other is a crisis of democracy. People are finding it harder than ever to engage in meaningful debate and to distinguish truth from propaganda. A major part of the solution to each of these crises will be access to quality educational opportunities at scale. At ETS, our piece of the puzzle is an assessments, and we are well aware that they also require reform. Assessments must help ensure access, not hinder it. They must be a doorway into education, not a brick wall. Ultimately, the purpose of an educational assessment is not to stress people out. No matter what our kids might think, it's to generate the 21st century most valuable commodity, which is data. Reliable, useful information to help students showcase their strengths and target their areas of development, to help educators find and deploy the most effective teaching methods, to help policymakers address inequity and pursue fairness. All this means that assessments must become more personalized to the learner, more authentic to the situations in which learning is applied, more formative and holistic, and better able to test soft skills as well as hard skills. And they must do it all without compromising rigor or excluding anyone. We at ETS are rising to the challenge. Work is underway to reinvent assessments for the 21st century, and at ETS we are proud to be a part of this important effort across the country. The wider point, though, is this. Whenever there are challenges, there are always opportunities. This is certainly true in pre-K to 12. The pandemic is receding, leaving behind unspent COVID relief funds. Meanwhile, many states boast record budget surpluses. So I think we can all agree that one of the best places to spend that money would be exactly here in pre-K to 12. That's especially true if you take care to target the neediest school districts. In other words, as the title of this session says, money matters. This webinar will help you make that argument using hard data. Case studies from around the country show that when you increase spending, you increase scores, attainment, and ultimately outcomes and earnings. Those gains are especially dramatic among low-income students and students of color. Some of the most recent data comes from our three-panelist home state of California, which I had the privilege of visiting just a couple of weeks ago. Some great reforms are taking place throughout the state, and I'm very encouraged that we're getting the opportunity to hear about those and other such efforts throughout the country. School finance reforms have been succeeded in narrowing the achievement gap. Our panel will help us figure out what went right, how these reforms can be adapted and implemented in other states, and what we can learn from them. This is a pressing issue, not least because most states will still have school funding models that systematically shortchange underserved communities. We can't allow this to continue. To guide us through this data, we could not wish for a more inspiring lineup of panelists. All of them are nationally recognized experts. I'd like to turn it over to David to do the honors of introducing our panelists today. And once again, welcome, and we look forward to the discussion. Thank you. Thank you so much, Amit, for those powerful remarks and for lifting up front and center as we get started, the whole struggle for equity and the importance of carrying that forward. Before we begin, I do want to thank Jamal Watson, Director of Advocacy and Philanthropy at ETS, Peter Cookson, a senior fellow at the Learning Policy Institute, and our researchers at ELC, Danielle Ferry, and Nicole Chiuyo for their work in putting this program together. Today's discussion will dig deep into what may be the most important development in education research over the last 40 to 50 years, the growing body of data and evidence that increased spending on public education, especially for low income students and students of color, improved student outcomes, graduation rates, and broader labor market and social gains. I can tell you this is the most important develop as a school finance litigator who's confronted the money doesn't matter defense by states in in courtrooms across the country. Today we have assembled three of our country's most accomplished experts to discuss the latest in the money matters research, where the research stands today, why it matters for our students, and how we go from here. The format today will be our panelists will make each of them will make presentations. That will be followed by an interactive discussion in response to your questions. So I want to urge all of you to put your questions in the Q&A box. The chat feature I'm told will be disabled so use the Q&A feature, put your questions in, we'll be looking through them, and we'll put as many of the of your questions to our panel as time permits. I should also mention that this webinar will be recorded, and it will be made available on our respective program websites so that you can access it later. So let me introduce our three panelists. And I'm going to be very brief in these introductions. These are so that we can get to the get to the presentations. First, we have Jesse Rothstein is the Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy and Economics at the University of California. He has appointments in the Department of Economics and the Goldman School of Public Policy. Jesse's research examines education policy, tax and transfer policy, and the labor market. His work has been published in leading journals in economics, public policy, education, and law. He has served an expert witness in several cases regarding teacher evaluation and public school finance. Next we have Dr. Rucker Johnson. Dr. Johnson is the Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy in the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Faculty Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research has appeared in leading academic journals and media outlets. He is the author of a very important book, a very important work that I would recommend to everyone, called Children of the Dream, Why School Integration Works. Dr. Johnson is committed to advancing his scholarly agenda by infusing insights into multidisciplinary perspectives to improve our understanding of the causes, consequences, and remedies for inequity in education in our country. And last but certainly not least, Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond is with us today. She is the Charles Duncan Professor of Education Emeritus at Stanford and the founding president of the Learning Policy Institute. Dr. Darling-Hammond created LPI, provide high quality research to inform policies enabling equitable and empowering education for each and every child. Her research has focused on fostering strong teaching and powerful learning by developing systems that ensure teachers and leaders are well prepared. Curriculum and assessment focus on meaningful learning and schools are equitably and adequately resourced. She has appointments too numerous to mention. I will mention president, she's the past president of the American Educational Research Association. She was on the transition teams for both presidents, Obama and recently for President Biden and currently serves as the president of the California State Board of Education. And I should mention she has just received the Yedon Prize for educational research, which is one of the most prestigious in the world. So we are very delighted to have our friend Dr. Darling-Hammond with us today. So I'm going to turn it over to our first panelist, Dr. Rothstein. Great. Thank you. I'm going to share some slides just as visual aids. So give me one second to get back going. Okay. Hopefully everybody can see that now. Thanks a lot everybody for having me. My role in this, at least to start us off, is going to be to try to give a little bit of history that provides context for current discussions over whether money matters and how money matters. So I'm going to try to review both the history of funding policy, particularly modern history and also how that's played out in the kind of academic debate about whether money matters. So very briefly, as the legal history is very important for understanding this, but the brief version of this is that historically in the United States schools have been funded by local school districts, often towns or cities, and typically they relied on property taxes to fund the schools. What that meant is that a place that had lots of property wealth could for relatively low tax rate generate lots of funding for its students, but a place that had needy students without a lot of property wealth would have a hard time raising much revenue. And so there were pretty deep inequities in spending levels both across and within states and also in tax rates. You often found that disadvantaged places had both higher tax rates and lower revenue levels than did more advantaged places simply because they didn't have much property tax base to draw on. In response to this, there have been a series of lawsuits going back over about 50 years now against different states on the arguing that the state that that system of school finance was not provided meeting the state's constitutional obligations to provide adequate or equitable school finance systems or education systems. These the legal historians kind of grouped these into three waves. There was a first fairly brief wave of cases that were brought under the US Constitution in federal courts arguing that the local funding violated equal protection or another cause of the US Constitution. There were some successes there, but then the Supreme Court basically ruled fairly early on that the US Constitution didn't require states to do anything about education, let alone provide it equitably. And so after that the action moved to state courts and there were a number of cases in the 70s and 80s arguing that the state constitutional language that required the legislature to support education required that that be equitable and that the situation where some places had higher tax rates but lower spending levels than others was really was not equitable and was violating the state's obligations. In a number of states, courts accepted that argument and ordered the states to implement finance reforms that somehow dealt with that equity or that inequity. And those reforms took a number of different shapes and sizes. They often involved a greater state role in funding the schools, but there was a real weakness of these reforms, which is that the argument they were making was the funding had to be equitable and there's multiple ways to achieve equity. One way to achieve equity is to lower everybody's funding to the lower levels. And so there was always a risk in these reforms that you could achieve equity by leveling down rather than by leveling up. Another limitation of these reforms is that the property tax wealth of variation that was the kind of basis of these lawsuits is pretty idiosyncratic. There are some places that just have high property tax wealth and others that have low property tax wealth and that's correlated with student need, but it's not perfectly correlated with student need. And so there were a lot of places that weren't that were that had really high needs that weren't benefiting from these because they also had moderate property tax wealth. And so starting around 1990, there have been a third wave of lawsuits based on the premise that the state constitution required not just equitable funding but adequate funding that the state has to provide enough funding to allow students to achieve the state's educational goals, which are often framed as to participate meaningfully in a modern information-based economy. These lawsuits are typically focused on the neediest districts in a state, often the lowest income district in a state, and saying, look, it doesn't matter what you're doing in the wealthy districts. If you're not providing enough funding to the low income districts, then you're not meeting your constitutional obligations. And these have been known as adequacy lawsuits and they've been the leading ones since around 1990. And they have, again, focused on raising revenues in the lowest income districts. And again, there are a number of ways that states have met that requirement, but it's often involved a fair amount of substantial increase in state aid to local school districts to supplement any local property tax funding. Okay, interplayed with this legal history of moving towards more requirements that states achieve equitable and adequate funding has been an intellectual debate, mostly centered around the kind of simple phrase, does money matter? In each of these lawsuits, there's been a kind of court case and the argument that's often made is, well, sure, there's inequity in funding or there's not very much funding, but it doesn't matter because we can't reliably draw a connection between the amount of funding that a district has and any benefits to students that it might be that the funding will be wasted. And so there's no way you can require a state to spend more money if it's not going to achieve the educational goals. Here's an example of a kind of argument that's often made. This was taken from a paper by Eric Hanischek. There are a number of others, but he's been a leading proponent to this view. He points out that between 1890 and 1990, spending per pupil in our schools has gone way, way up. We spend much, much more than we did in 1890. And it's increased fairly steadily over the last 50 or 70 years. At the same time, average student test scores haven't gone up that much. And so his argument is that this money doesn't reliably translate into student outcomes. Now, there are serious limitations for this kind of a casual argument. One of them being that a lot of the increase in school spending has been to achieve goals that we've added onto the school system that are other than raising student test scores. So in particular, we now take much more seriously than we did in 1940, the need to provide educational services to students with severe physical and intellectual disabilities. Those services are often extremely expensive. They are counted in our tabulation of school spending, but often those students aren't even tested. And so they're not included in the test score results. And so we wouldn't expect that spending to translate into higher student achievement. That's not the only problem with this kind of an argument. Another issue is the population that's served by the public schools has changed quite a lot. And the expectations we have for students have changed quite a lot. And so, for example, if you look at 17-year-old test scores, we keep many more students in school until age 17 now than we did in 1940. That means they're included in the tests, but to a greater degree. But they're probably not the highest achieving students. And so that tends to depress the test score trends. So spending is going up. We're serving more students and we're serving them better. But that doesn't mean we're raising average scores among the students who are left because a larger share of students remain. So in recent decades in social science, there's really been what's often referred to as an empirical revolution, a change in the way we do empirical research that focuses much more than we did in the past on the idea that these kinds of casual comparisons may be misleading about the causal effects that we're interested in. So we may be very worried about just comparing a high spending place and a low spending place or a high spending time and a low spending time and thinking that we can infer the effect of that spending from that. And so there's been much more emphasis on research designs that approximate randomized experiments. It's very hard to do randomized experiments in social science. People don't like to be experimented on and there's lots of reasons why you can't do it. But there are often natural circumstances that approximate that where for reasons unrelated to student outcomes, we'll see more resources in some places than in other places. So one example where this is where this is played out is in research on school finance. It turns out that these school finance reforms, they've happened at widely varying times across different states. Some states did them early, some states have been late. And often that's for pretty arbitrary reasons. It's because the legal process takes a long time to wind through to a conclusion. And so the reform doesn't happen until the case is decided. And that can be quick in some states and slow in other states. That means that different states have seen pretty substantial shifts in their funding regimes at different times for reasons that are probably unrelated to other determinants of student outcomes. And we can use that variation to identify the causal effect of these finance reforms on student outcomes. So there's been a number of studies. I've done some, Rucker Johnson has done some others have done others that have tried to compare changes in outcomes in states or districts that were affected by these reforms to comparable states or districts that weren't affected to try to identify the effects of these reforms on student outcomes. So I'll talk about, I'll use one of my studies as an example, but there's other studies that do this as well. So my study focused on adequacy reforms. These are reforms that emphasize spending in the most disadvantaged districts that we talked about. You'd expect that if there's one, if these reforms are effective, then we would see higher spending in the lowest income districts after one of these reforms. And if you just simply divide up the states into about the half of states that have had adequacy reforms, and half of states that don't, you see that relative spending in low income districts has gone way up in the states that had reforms, much more than it has in the states that haven't had reforms. So in 1990, both states, both groups of states were similar, and they were spending about $1,000 per people less in the lowest income districts than they were in the high income districts. By 2010, the states that had had reforms were spending about $700 per people more in the low income districts than they were in the high income districts. While the states that hadn't had reforms had closed the gap a little bit, but we're still spending about $500 per people less. So that's a sign that these reforms have really changed the terrain in terms of the amount of spending available in low income districts. We can ask how much money we're talking about, how much of this we can attribute to the reforms by looking at the timing of spending changes around the reforms. And what we see is that when one of these reforms passes, we see a pretty quick, within two or three years, increase in state funding to the lowest income districts, amounting to about $950 per pupil. And this is, again, relative to other states that haven't had reforms. In high income districts, it turns out we see also increases in spending, but they're much smaller. States tend to respond to these court orders by increasing spending overall, and making sure that low income districts get a disproportionate share of that. And so the high income districts only get about $350 per pupil more. That means that we can think of these reforms as giving us a shock of an extra $600 per pupil per year that lasts as far as we can tell for at least 20 years after the reform happens. And then we can ask what happens to student achievement. And what happens to student achievement? Well, in the lowest income districts, we see the test scores start rising after one of these reforms happen, and they rise gradually but steadily over the next 20 years. So the cumulative effect is that by 10 years after a reform, the test scores in the lowest income school districts are higher by about a tenth of a standard deviation. That's a lot. It's not enough to close the gap between the low income districts and the high income districts, but it's certainly nothing to sneeze at, and it's a benefit that we'd really like to be able to generate. We can see that that $600 per pupil every year does translate into higher better student outcomes. There's been other work. I'll mention one other study by Jackson and Dr. Johnson and Perseco that look at the earlier reforms, the equity reforms before 1990. By looking at older reforms, you can look at longer term outcomes for students exposed to them who've been out of school for decades by the time you measure them. And they find that those reforms lead to higher wages, higher family incomes, and lower poverty of the students who are exposed to them. So there's a growing body of evidence that if you try to construct a clean comparison that identifies close to random variation in school funding, that that funding does translate into better outcomes for students, better test scores, better graduation rates, higher and higher adults, economic success. So what can we conclude from all of this? I think the conclusion is that when you apply modern empirical methods to try to answer this question, the answer is very clear. The old money doesn't matter position is really not sustained when you apply methods that identify the causal effects of funding. Money does matter. And interestingly, most of these studies identified the effect of money from court order and finance reforms. And there's been lots of concern that maybe courts aren't very good at making sure that money is spent well. That when a court comes in and says you have to spend more money, it might be sent out in a way that doesn't lead to it being spent effectively. But we see that in these reforms, which may sometimes have weak controls over how the money spent, that money is effective. And so that's the policy relevant variation. That's what we can do to affect policy, to affect spending as we can implement reforms like this. And we find that these reforms are effective. Now we have to be realistic about what to expect from this. Sometimes there's an expectation that these kinds of reforms are going to eliminate the income gap in student outcomes. That's not really a plausible expectation. There's lots of other things that affect student outcomes. And money, while it matters, isn't the only thing that matters. No reasonable amount of money is going to eliminate student gaps. But it can contribute to shrinking them. And that's a valuable goal in itself. And the other thing I'll mention about this work, which I think will feed into what Rucker is going to talk about, is that these reforms are typically focused on the allocation of money from the state to individual school districts. And they focus much less on how that money is allocated across schools within districts or across students within schools. And so while you can achieve, you can ensure that low-income districts get more revenue. You may be that we need other tools beyond these state level reforms to ensure that low-income schools get more revenues. And with that, I'll stop and turn it over to Rucker. Thank you. Hey, well, thank you, Dr. Rothstein. I'm going to ask one quick question for you before we turn to Dr. Johnson. Can you just unpack a little bit for our audience some of the key attributes of what you describe as state finance reforms, school finance reforms? What does it look like? And obviously, we're talking here about increasing the distribution or the allocation of funding and resources across districts within a state. What does that look like that yields these gains? That's one question. And also, your work, as I read it, recognizes that about half the states are a little bit more haven't really engaged in these kinds of reforms. Can you talk a little bit about the impact of states not doing this? How does that impact students and student outcomes and labor market gains and so forth? Yeah, those are both very good questions. The answer to what do these reforms look like is they vary enormously. In some cases, the court will rule, you're right, this is an unconstitutional arrangement. State legislature go fix this. And then they leave it entirely to the state legislature about how to fix it. And legislatures will typically adopt new funding formulas that involve some combination of just direct state grants to districts. Sometimes they involve power equalization formulas that say that for every dollar a district raises the state will supplement it by another 50 cents if it's a low income district or 10 cents if it's a high income district. There are lots of different forms of mistake. Sometimes these reforms are focused on particular deficiencies in the school system rather than the overall system. So one common feature is that the lawsuits are focused on inadequate school facilities. And the reforms are focused on developing new revenue streams to support school renovations and construction. So they vary a lot, but the kind of common feature is at least of the post 1990 reforms is they're really focused on raising spending in the lowest income districts and achieving what's judged to be an adequate level of funding. In terms of what happens to the states that haven't implemented reforms, you could see in one of the graphs I showed that those districts still have pretty substantial gaps. They're spending less in the low income districts than they are in the high income districts, combining all sources of state, federal, and local revenues. And that means that students in those districts are being left behind and they're not getting the same advantages as students in high income districts. It's probably, I mean, I think it's overwhelmingly agreed that it costs more to provide an adequate education to a disadvantaged student than it does to an advantaged student. They may need more supports in school. They may also need more supports for outer school aspects of their lives. And so if you're taking a group of students who need more and giving them less, you're not going to achieve adequate outcomes for those students. And so that's the consequence of states not implementing these reforms. So the goal is to create more progressivity in the formulas so that poor kids, essentially poor kids and kids in poor schools or high poverty schools get more. Is that what your sort of bottom line point? It can be progressive. It can also be everybody gets the same amount of money, but they all get a larger amount of money. So some states have decided to respond by saying we're just going to raise, going to expand the overall pie, make sure that it's evenly distributed, but it's enough that the low income district can achieve what they need. This doesn't have to come at the expense of high income places. Right. All right. So let's move on. We're going to hear about an on the ground, in place, real time set of finance reforms, state and local in California from Dr. Johnson. So, so take it away, Dr. Johnson. Yes, I'm wondering if folks at my, my screen is stuck for a second. I'm wondering if folks can see trying to, I'm having a little bit of a technical challenge getting to my screen chair. Okay, can you second? Okay. Sorry about that. Can you see? Yes. And you can hear me? Yes, we can. Go ahead. Take it away. It felt great to be with you. Thank you, Jesse. Thank you for the great introduction, David, and everyone for being here. You know, as Jesse was saying, you know, across the country, about 90% of public school spending is provided through the blend of state and local dollars. And so states really play a big role in terms of the both the adequacy and the progressivity of that funding formula that really provides the foundational building blocks upon which resource equity is built. And so while there's a lot of concerns that are expressed about short run budget deficits, I would argue that more attention needs to be played to the deficits of opportunity, particularly for children from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds. I'm just trying to get access to my pointer and I am having trouble getting the slide to turn. Okay, crap. There's nothing. I'm just trying to my slide. Okay. See. I'm having trouble with advancing the slide. Okay. I think that I need to stop sharing and I'm having some technical challenge. I'm wondering if I can ask Linda to go now because there's some kind of technical challenge where I'm not able to change the slide. Is that possible, David? I apologize for the inconvenience. Let me give you one tip also, Rucker. If you exit the screen share and go back in and find the one that starts at the beginning of your slides, you might be able to make it work. Did you try that yet? I did and it didn't work. So unfortunately, I'm going to have to get our IT. I have to pass up the time to Dr. Don Hammon. I really apologize for the inconvenience. This is one of the... So if you stop sharing, I can share. There we go. Let's see if I can share my screen. I was planning to... Let me see if I unmute. You're not muted. We can hear you. Okay, great. I was planning to reference back to Rucker's presentation, but I will reference forward to it because it will be coming. And talk a little bit about how money matters. He'll present some wonderful data about what's been going on in California where a new progressive funding formula was put in place not quite a decade ago. And quite often, as Jesse said, you see the way in which this plays out over the decade after a school finance reform. So I'm going to talk about some of the things we know from the research about what matters and how it plays out. I want to start with a little bit of context that right now the United States is in a highly unequal state, large economic disparities in personal income. We've had growing segregation since the 1980s. Poverty and segregation are concentrated, very high rates of childhood poverty, which were minimized for a year with the American Rescue Plan Act. But when those child tax credits were not continued, are going up again, food and housing insecurity, all of this, of course, in the most vulnerable communities. We've got teacher shortages, which have to do with the rates of compensation for teachers going down, growing numbers of students who've been opting out of school since the pandemic. So we're in a moment where a great deal of effort is needed to address the underlying inequalities in the society. Right now the wealthiest 1% of people hold 10 times more wealth than the bottom 50% of people combined in this country. The top 1% holding more than 30% of the wealth, the bottom 50% all together holding only about 3% of the wealth. We haven't been as unequal as that since the great crash in 1929. Child poverty rates are among the highest in the industrialized world. As I said, we had a little dip, but they're going to go back up and are going back up because the policy that was reducing them for the last year was not continued. Poverty is increasingly concentrated in specific districts in schools. They're also increasingly segregated. That also means they have high rates of pupil needs concentrated in these schools. These data from the education law centers making the grade right before the pandemic found that only about 12 states spent at least 10% more on high poverty districts, most spent less. And so at the top of the program, Amit was talking about some of the crises we're experiencing, the democracy crisis among them. And of course we've been facing a public health crisis, an economic crisis, a climate crisis, a civil rights crisis, and a long overdue reckoning, all of which are manifesting in ways that reflect these generations of systemic inequality. But these are moments also that often lead to massive generational social change. We saw that in the 1930s, after the great crash in the progressive era, the 1960s, with a lot of activism around civil rights, multiple assassinations, but we had civil rights gains that occurred during that time. A great deal of education innovation in the 90s, we'll see what we have facing us in the 2020s. But these often come on a 30 year cycle. In the 1960s, when there was a huge amount of investment in dealing both with an anti poverty program, the war on poverty, and the great society, we saw very substantial reductions in the black white achievement gap. You can see just over a relatively short period of time, the gap was cut in half in reading and by about a third in math. But those reforms were undone in the 1980s. And the gap now 30 years later is 30% larger than it was then. We lost a lot of policies in the 1980s. As I mentioned, the anti poverty programs, funding for families and communities, housing, nutrition, desegregation assistance, investments in the teaching force, investments in state education agencies, ability to help schools, and in things like school support, summer learning, etc. I remember growing up in the 60s, and it was commonplace in cities like the one that I grew up in, that summer learning was available, summer jobs were available, investments in a wide range of community based organizations were available. And I mentioned the confluence of segregation and inequities in school funding, the Brown versus Board of Education case, which was consolidating a number of cases, and the ones that preceded it, variously tackled segregation and school finance reform. It turned out that the winning argument in Brown was around desegregation, but it's because of the confluence of those forces that these matter. And Rucker was not asked to talk about his study, but you should get his book Children of the Dream, which looked at the effects of desegregation over a 60 year span, and found that for Black children, exposure to desegregated settings throughout their school year had very large effects on high school graduation, earnings, reductions in incarceration rates, and this was almost entirely due to the increase in educational quality and spending that was associated with that desegregation. So I mentioned that because we're in an era again, where we have resegregated and these issues go hand in glove, one with each other. There's a slide missing here. There it is. Over the course of the 2000s to 2015 era, testing sort of replaced investing in a lot of states. Our agenda federally was to monitor test scores over time and have sanctions for schools that didn't increase those scores, but this happened during a time when funding for schools was declining in the great recession, when poverty was growing, when inequality was growing, and overall on the international tests, we went down in that era in reading science and math. So testing was not enough, and the factors that contributed to this slide were the growing poverty, state cuts, the shortages of teachers, also a disconnect between the kind of assessments that are used on the international test, and the more low level skills tested in the United States. So if you put all this together, the anatomy of inequality, as I think of it, starts on this foundation of poverty and segregation, on which we tend to layer unequal school resources, that then produces inequitable distributions of well qualified educators. And in many states, you'll find that particularly now with shortages, large numbers of people are coming into teaching mostly placed in high minority, high poverty districts who are not prepared for teaching. That exacerbates unequal access to high quality curriculum and often results in a lot of churn, because people who are underprepared also lead at faster rates, which creates dysfunctional schools. And on a pedagogical level, both the under preparation comes with inadequate understanding of how to organize instruction and scaffold learning and teach heterogeneous classes and understand social, emotional and cognitive needs. And if you add implicit bias to this, which is a constant in American society, it also then reinforces the assumptions that students are the problem, that families don't care, leads often to very harsh discriminatory exclusionary discipline, which supports higher dropout rates, and an activation of a lot of stereotype threat in schools. So when we think about what boosts achievement, you've already heard Jesse describe, and you will soon hear Rucker describe, how school finance reforms that increase funding for low income students especially, improve educational attainment, later employment and wages to very substantial levels. We also know from decades of research that high quality preschool boosts achievement and reduces special education placements and grade retention and other costly elements in later schooling. We know that having fully prepared teachers matters for both retention of teachers and for their effectiveness and experience matters. And it turns out that quality as measured, for example, by national board certification, which is a way that teachers can demonstrate accomplishment in their teaching, that if you have teachers who are fully prepared, experienced and board certified, it accounts for larger achievement gains than race and parent education combined. So the maldistribution of well-qualified teachers is an issue, but substantial investments can make a difference. We also know from recent research that having a black teacher for even one year significantly increases achievement in graduation rates and college going for black students in particular. And this has to do with the ways in which that relationship affirms and supports those students in their progress. Relatedly, social emotional supports and restorative practices have been found now to improve achievement and graduation and mental health. And being in a community school, which offers wraparound supports, mental health services, health services, social services, expanded learning times, summer school and after school, also improves achievement and graduation rates. So we know some things about high leverage ways to spend the money that may come from school finance reforms. And quite often these become part of those lawsuits. As David Sharer knows, I've been an expert witness in a number of these. And the question comes up from the courts. What is it that matters? How should we direct the funding? So this whole child approach is kind of emerging, I think, from the research that when resources are aimed at people needs rather than a function of just the local property tax base, when they focus on the kind of curriculum that matters for the era that we're in so that students are well prepared, when they focus on skilled teachers and leaders and offer wraparound supports, including early childhood education, you can make a substantial difference not only in the classroom experience of young people, but in their ability to take advantage from that classroom experience. And I'm just going to suggest a few examples from states. If you look across the U.S. at achievement differences, they're very substantial between and among states. This is from just before the pandemic. You see the top scoring states, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Vermont, and Connecticut, and they've been in that position for quite some time. And I'm going to talk very briefly about the ways in which they, in the cases of Connecticut, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, followed up on litigation to spend money in ways that not only raised the average, but also substantially close achievement gaps. The first of these was Connecticut. They had an Educational Excellence Act in 1987. And their way of leveraging equity, and there were two lawsuits. One was around racial desegregation, and one was around spending that preceded this. But they took the strategy of raising teacher salaries to the first in the nation, but they did it on an equalizing basis. And since that's the biggest part of funding in any district, it equalized overall funding. They raised standards for teachers' skills through their licensing and education process, mentoring and performance assessments for both teachers and principals, really supportive principals, learning and evaluations so that they could support instruction, professional development, big, huge professional development investments. And then they developed standards and assessments that were open-ended assessments where students were engaged in inquiries and focusing on problem solving. And over a very brief period of time, you could see them emerge as the top scoring state in the nation on the national assessments in every subject area over the course of the 1990s. Following them, Massachusetts just a little bit later did its major student funding reform, which introduced sort of a weighted student funding formula based on pupil needs. They increased funding substantially in a way that that directed to those pupil needs invested in preschool healthcare. Again, standards for teaching and teacher education. Students' standards with high quality assessments of the curriculum was also moving in a direction of productive learning and pursue these policies, including redesign of schools for more than 15 years. And you can see that the investments went up in the way that Jesse described following the lawsuits, but also they became the top scoring state in the nation. They have stayed there pretty much ever since except for when New Jersey finally got on the bandwagon, if you will. David knows this case well. He was very responsible for it. I was working as a summer intern at the Education Law Center in Philadelphia as we were pursuing the question of similar reforms in Pennsylvania, but 30 years of New Jersey fighting school reforms, nine different court decisions, continuing to say you've got to bring the low-spending districts, which were in that time, primarily Black districts, Patterson, Newark, Camden, where I student taught, and others that were spending half as much as places like New Brunswick and Princeton. Ultimately, in 1998, they finally put in parity funding from the high-need districts, the so-called Abbott districts, which was the name of the lawsuit at that time. High-quality preschool in those districts for three and four-year-olds, curriculum and assessments, again focused on higher-order thinking skills. Bilingual education was a big investment in the literacy area, teacher and leader learning investments, and then whole school reform models, which really address the sort of personalization and social and emotional learning and skills with the whole child in mind. Again, over that next decade, you can see the increase in scores and the reduction of the achievement gap. By 2007, Black and Hispanic students in New Jersey outscored the average student in California, which was at that moment, disinvesting in its schools. And today, New Jersey is a state that is primarily students of color. About 40% of students are also identified as low income, but they now rank first in eighth grade reading and writing, third tied with some other states in eighth grade math, first in high school graduation rates tied with Iowa at 91%. So you can see the long-term effects, but again, unfolding over about a decade and then continuing as the policies have continued. And I just want to mention North Carolina, because that was not a high-achieving state. They were in 1990 way below. They were like 48th in the country. This happens to be their math scores. Again, they undertook very similar reforms in response to a lawsuit there, which unfortunately has had to be re-upped again, and went from well below the national average to well above the national average in math and continued that for a period of time until they actually in recent years have begun disinvesting again. So you can almost track the process over time of big investments in equalizing funding, investing in teachers in multiple ways in North Carolina, investing in preschool, and thinking about the ways in which to improve the quality of curriculum. So the anatomy of equity really does have to include these days the supports for children, as well as the equitable school resources. It's important that we be thinking about the way in which supporting healthcare food, housing, preschool, and other life conditions for children is foundational to then adding the school resources spent in ways that leverage the better prepared workforce, the stronger curriculum, and then the more effective schools. And I'll just close with, I think, what motivates a lot of the work that people on this panel and many of you in the audience are doing, which is that we have to have a frame of mind about what we're doing and why in the society. And I think of John Dewey's quote, what the best and wisest parent wants for his or her child, that must the community want for all of its children. And it proves to be productive for the entire society when that's the case. Any other goal is narrow and unlovely and acted upon it destroys our democracy. Back to the theme that Amit started us with, only by being true to the full growth of all the individuals who make it up, can society by any chance be true to itself? And I will stop sharing and hope that Rucker has solved this tech problem and we can continue the conversation. And Linda, I'm going to ask a question here. I get to ask one, so I'm going to do it. And, you know, as been mentioned before, the unit of government that's legally responsible for education in the United States is not the U.S. government, it's our 50 states and in effect what you're saying and what Dr. Rothstein is saying is we have 50 state systems of education in the states through their school finance policies control the level and distribution of state and local resources across their states. I want to return to North Carolina for a moment. You and LPI were involved just recently in developing a comprehensive remedial, a new comprehensive remedial plan in the Leandro School Finance case that was signed off by the state and by the court and just recently North Carolina Supreme Court ordered the transfer of funding within the state budget close to a billion dollars to begin phasing in the funding of that comprehensive remedial plan. Can you talk to a little bit, you know, I'm always interested in what's happening on the ground in these states. North Carolina is a particularly interesting state. Can you talk a little bit about how your evolution of the research that you've just laid out informed your work and the work of the researchers on developing that comprehensive remedial plan and the specific elements of that and how that's changed over time? Yeah, I want to acknowledge that LPI was a partner in that work with West Ed and with the Center at North Carolina State University. So we had some wonderful partners in that work, but yes, we kind of built on the research that has been done over these years to sort of think about not only more equitable funding and of course that's at the base and how you get that to districts in ways that are productive and respond to student needs, but also the questions about we looked at after many years of being a leader around teacher investments, North Carolina eliminated a lot of those programs and we see this, you know, pendulum swing quite often, but we looked at where the state was around the distribution of well-prepared teachers. We found that the earlier reforms had actually produced teachers through the scholarships that was North Carolina teaching fellows and North Carolina principal fellows who were both more effective than other teachers and principals and more likely to stay, which is ads and achievement level gain with it. So we looked at the issues of the workforce. We also looked at high poverty schools and what kids in high poverty schools, you know, which are in North Carolina also extremely segregated. We're getting at what they lacked and the whole question around how do you build the wraparound supports for students, which we know can make a difference, factors in to what kind of strategies you'll undertake to support children in a whole child sense in those high poverty schools and of course preschool, which they had started a wonderful program, Smart Start, I think it was called, but it was not getting to most kids. It had been defunded and defunded. So again, we were looking at what access do students have, how do you ensure that the quality that can produce stronger achievement is actually in the policy structure for those elements. So, you know, you can construct an action plan as we did that really pays attention to both the overall distribution of money and the ways in which certain elements can make a big difference. And just one quick follow up. Now that we're all hoping and the things don't change there, the court has changed, but the things get moving, is there any plan to evaluate the investments and how they're going to play out? That would be a good idea to have such a plan. There is not a formal plan yet. Okay, I'm sure that they could get the money flowing. That's, you know, going to be its own issue, but it would be a very good idea. And you can see that as we've gone back and evaluated, for example, what was done in New Jersey, and in some of the other states that it makes a big difference to be able to understand what's working and to be able to keep that in front of the governor, the legislature and others. And you know this very well in New Jersey. Oh, yes. The evidence matters not just to win the case, but also to sustain the reforms over an extended period of time. Such a such an important point. Well, I'm going to, I think Dr. Johnson is ready. I think Rutgers back. Yeah. Okay. I hope it's all worked out. Go ahead. Take it away. Last. Thank you. Thank you, Linda. That was wonderful. Thank you, Jesse. Thank you, David, for your patience. So as I was saying, I'm delighted to be here. I want to have given that great backdrop and great evidence that was already put forth. I want to zoom in on California's recent experience. California, the nation's largest and most diverse state public education system. And really in 2011, right, a lot of, as I was saying before, a lot of attention is given to the short-run budget deficits without sufficient attention to the deficits of opportunity, particularly for children from more socioeconomic and disadvantaged families and communities that influence fuel and fuel the achievement gaps and the longer run socioeconomic mobility trajectories. And so when we think about as late as 2012, where we California ranked last nationwide and average per people spending adjusted for differences in cost of living and consistently ranked in the bottom 15 among state systems in the 10 years leading up to the local control funding formula that was passed in 2013, where California implemented one of the most ambitious school funding reform efforts the state had experienced in a generation, the local control funding formula. And really the goal was to, you know, recognize that to reduce academic achievement gaps between children from socioeconomic disadvantaged families and their more advantaged counterparts, that commitment had to be made at the state level, and it was in the form of an $18 billion increase in state support. But it was distributed incrementally over an eight-year period. And so what I want to kind of summarize is that experience leading into the year immediately preceding the pandemic. And, you know, this reform was distinctive in two major ways. First, it's multi-year design, pre-committed the funds, so that districts were assured this would not be temporary, reversible through politics change, or, and therefore they could be empowered to plan long-term transformative initiatives rather than one-off expenditures. And so what that did also secondly is the funding came from minimal restrictions on how schools could tailor how they would use the money. And so they were given more fiscal sovereignty. But the key thing is that it was targeted not to district property wealth, but the student based on student level disadvantage as defined by the proportion of district level proportion, unduplicated low-income students eligible for free and reduced price lunch, English language learners, homeless or foster youth. In other words, the district proportion that represented one of those four high-need categories then was one of the linchpins upon which the funding formula was implemented. And so there was a base grant of 8,000 per pupil depending on grade level with more spending for the early elementary school grades to keep class sizes low, particularly in those early learning years. And then it provided a supplemental grant, roughly $1,600 for each high-need student, which was about 20% of the adjusted base grant. This is a funding formula by the time it was implemented and fully funded by 2018-19, meaning by the seventh year it was fully funded. And that included a concentration grant of $5,300 per high-need student in districts that had more than 55% high-need students. And so the average, say non-Hispanic white student was in a district that was about 55% high-need students. The average black student was in a district that was about 70-75% high-need student. And just so that you can see the ways in which the Great Recession particularly led to hemorrhaging and led teacher layoffs in the aftermath of the home foreclosure crisis that disproportionately affected lower-income communities and led to a significant widening of the gap, that wasn't curved until the LCFF passage and then the subsequent rollout and implementation of this funding. And so what I want you to just see is the gradual rollout of the pre versus post-LCFF increase. This is for the grades K through 3. And this is just showing to you as a function of student percent student disadvantage. And what I want to bring to your attention is particularly the think at the 55% and above district student disadvantage so that the concentration grant that kicked in for districts above 55% was designed explicitly to account for the higher than cost, the higher cost of providing equal educational opportunity for concentrated poverty for districts that have multiple disadvantages along many dimensions, but including large proportion of English language learners. And so the pre-LCFF formula didn't have any chink in the funding formula. While it was a progressive funding formula, this both dramatically increased the overall levels of funding, but particularly the progressivity in the funding for concentrated poverty and high-need districts. And so what I'm going to be doing in this study that I'm trying to summarize is looking at this gradual rollout in the funding to create a difference in difference design where I'm looking at the student achievement outcomes. What I want you to see in this figure is that between 0 and 55%, if you were from the same cohort, there wasn't really significant progressivity in the funding formula until after 55%. So if we're looking at students who are from districts of the same cohort, all of the kind of impact from 0 to 55% is really between cohort. But if we look within cohort, all of the kind of major changes are really beyond the district percent, the chink in the 55% line. So what I'm going to be doing is using student-level data for children that are followed beginning in kindergarten all the way through K-12. This includes 6.2 million students in each year across the K-12 years. And I'm going to be looking at across analyses across all 10,000 schools and 1,000 districts in the state, but focusing particular attention on the rollout period of LC-Effect implementation from 2013 through 2019. And what's going to be important here is that obviously, when we look at student learning trajectories, the learning outcomes are a function of not just the school resources in that particular assessment here, but rather the entire stream of school resources that they experienced in the years leading up to that particular grade. So I'm going to be looking at the multi-year exposure of spending so that I'm able to look at children from the same district, but who reach, say, third grade like in other words, children from the same district, but across adjacent cohorts that were exposed to the greater funding and particularly in among the districts that experience much larger increases because of the funding formulas kink at the 55% and above over 55% district disadvantage. And so what we're going to do is recognize that the student composition, family background, neighborhood background, those are things that are going to affect student outcomes independent of school outcomes, but by using and analyzing the impact of school finance reforms, in this case LCFF, to isolate the effect of the school spending increases independent of other factors and independent of the change in the amount of district autonomy about how to use the money, we're able to isolate the spending impacts independent of those things. And so what I want you to kind of appreciate here is we're trying to not just focus on the funding reform and the spending increases on average, but to isolate how the spending was used. In other words, we're hypothesizing pathways that are instructional expenditures that reduce class sizes, increases teacher salaries. We document the ways in which the school spending led to reductions in teacher turnover, particularly in high concentrated poverty districts, allocation of spending toward more guidance counselors, health services. These are kind of instructionally student centered expenditures and we're kind of contrast those with spending that will say on administrative salaries or buildings and capital expenditures that we don't always expect to yield returns on learning outcomes at least immediately. And then teacher professional development, we're trying to unpack not just whether money matters, but the types for whom, how, and the mechanisms that undergird what fuel student achievement trajectories and ultimately what can then launch greater upward economic mobility in the longer term. So let me just try to highlight some of the timing. So for example, remember in the figure about the spending, we were talking about the spending, if you look at this figure, this figure's focusing on the fifth grade math achievement. And here I'm contrasting before and after LCFS. So by 2018-19 school year, it worked in this figure looking at the change in fifth grade math achievement and grade level equivalence. And what you can see is for children that over and above common statewide time trends, if you look at the zero to 55%, right, these districts were not eligible for the concentration grant, rather the concentration grant kicked in after the 55%. And that's precisely where you see the major improvement in fifth grade math achievement. In particular, we're seeing about a one full grade level improvement for children from the same school before in the year immediately, like preceding the major rollout of LCFS versus fifth graders who had experienced that spending increase in their second grade, third grade, fourth grade, fifth grade years were seeing a major improvement both in math and reading. And it's particularly following the same profile as the actual funding formula, where zero to 55%, there's more limited improvement and controlling for school fixed effects and common statewide time trends. But most of the drive is coming from the greater dosage that is from the district funding formula applying more spending increases beyond 55%. We see that both in math and reading. And in particular, this didn't happen overnight, meaning cohorts that only experienced one year of the improvement in funding saw more limited improvements in the student achievement. We see this by looking at the outcomes across every grade and subject. And what we find is $1,000 increase in per people spending, looking at the same students and followed over time, but across adjacent cohorts from the same school, we see that $1,000 increase experience for three consecutive years. Let's say if we're looking at the fifth grade math achievement, we're talking about $1,000 increase in third grade, fourth grade, fifth grade consecutive years, we're seeing a full grade level improvement in math achievement relative to the achievement that was typical of students from that same school before these major school spending increases in those schools. And we're seeing that in every grade and in every subject, a full grade level improvement on average. And importantly, in California, basic A districts are districts that have raised such a high level of their have more fluent wealth bases that they're able to raise local revenue that already exceed the state targets for spending. And for those basic A districts, they're not actually eligible for the LCF. They're able to retain the locally raised revenue, but they're not eligible for the LCF funding. Well, that creates a nice placebo test that we're able to document that we don't see any of these improvements in the math achievement that we saw for all of the other districts in California, but we see about 125 basic A districts in California that are eligible for LCF. We don't see any of those patterns of improvement that had that dose response that was increasing with the number of school age years of exposure and was increasing in the dosage. That is the amount of funding that a district received. And you see not only this translated into student achievement as measured by standardized math and reading test scores that are normed to the NAIC test scores. And remember, I should have said, but on the eve of the passage of LCF, the NAIC data demonstrated that California had the largest socioeconomic achievement gradient of any state. Now, what we see in the aftermath, however, is like it's leading to significant improvements in high school graduation rates. I'm talking about about a five percentage point increase among low income students who experienced $1,000 increase in per people spending throughout their high school years relative to low income students in more fluent areas that weren't eligible or did not receive the same level of spending increase. So we're not only seeing an achievement in math and reading across every grade in math, but also in college readiness. That when we look at the significant college readiness gaps, McCall, Kurlander and other colleagues have demonstrated that the college readiness markers are highly predictive of college success as measured by college GPA. And what we find is when these schools and districts experience the $1,000 increase in per people spending experience throughout the high school years, ninth grade, 10th grade, 11th grade, that it translated into about a 7.6 percentage point increase in the likelihood of meeting the college readiness standards in math, and about a 9.1 percentage point increase in the likelihood of meeting the college readiness standards in reading. Now, what we want to do is unpack these average improvements to look at the whole histogram of school specific spending effects across all the schools. Again, remember, there's a thousand districts in California, 10,000 schools. So we're able to document the distribution of school specific spending effects in great level equivalents. That's what this figure is showing in the estimate of $1,000 increase in per people spending. Again, so it's like you're looking at two districts or two students really that have the same third grade math achievement. But the only difference is that the later cohorts experience the $1,000 increase in per people spending in their fourth grade, their fifth grade, their sixth grade consecutive years. And we're seeing that notice this histogram of the school specific spending impacts, none of them are to the left of zero. We're seeing the central tendency on one and even in the relatively less effective districts in terms of spending impacts, it's almost half a grade level improvement. These are huge effects and we see them across reading math and for most of the grades that we see. Now, one of the things that Jesse was highlighting that we're pushing on is the intra district resource allocation. We're able to not just document the average effects, but the distribution of effects. And we find that of these effects of a portion of the per people spending effects, half of them actually vary between schools within districts. And half of them vary on average between districts. And so we try to drill into what explains the school spending effectiveness differences. And what we find is the five like biggest contributors are districts that reduced class sizes, increased teacher salaries and that fueled lower teacher turnover. These were the biggest instructional related expenditures that were most highly associated with the achievement gains, both in reading and math and supporting efforts in guidance counselors and health services, as well as teacher professional development. Now this is a period where as Linda was highlighting, testing without investing, right, is not really an efficacious recipe for these kinds of improvements, but with curricular common core standards alignment and other coincident policies that when it's an unfunded mandate versus it's a funded mandate with those additional supports, we're seeing big improvements. David, can you maybe just give me a sense of, do I have three minutes? Give me a sense of what I'm working with. I'd say three minutes is good. Okay, so we look beyond test scores because we recognize test scores don't pick up the full picture. We find significant reductions in student behavior problems, including the annual incidents of school discipline incidents that's inclusive of, you know, suspension, expulsion, et cetera, and we find those effects particularly for black boys. So when you look at the results, the $1,000 increase of per-people spending say throughout the high school years, we're seeing about a 4 percentage point decline in the likelihood of the annual incidents of suspension, expulsion, or disciplinary incidents, and particularly pronounced in the high school years, but we're also seeing that for black boys, it's a lot, lot bigger, right? And the key thing is these results don't include LAUSD because their school disciplinary policy timing was quite different than many other states, I mean, many other districts in California. So we're not including that here, and they're such a large district that actually would distort some of the patterns here. But the only last thing I would like to just conclude with is that a lot of these spending effectiveness and the differences across districts is partly attributable to things that precede school entry, that is kindergarten, that is the quality and the school readiness of incoming cohorts. And this is connected to the introduction of transitional kindergarten. And while I'm not going to summarize that here, I will say that what we find is that the transitional kindergarten access that was an effective greater access to pre-K led the K-12 spending to become much more efficacious in building skills and leading to greater learning outcomes. So I'm closing with this, David. We find positive significant effects of LCFF-induced increases in per-people spending. We find that for every grade, every subject, and for every school that experienced this new infusion of state funds, we find a dose response that the impacts on achievement increase with the school-aged years of exposure. And with the amount of increased LCFF funding, we find impacts on college readiness on high school graduation rates and a significant narrowing of achievement gaps, including reductions in student behavior problems and positive effects for English language learners. What I want to just highlight though is the synergistic effects of transitional kindergarten and greater access to pre-K learning opportunities and the K-14 school spending. That is, there's large positive transitional kindergarten impacts for low-income children on third and fourth grade reading and math achievement, but those effects are much more pronounced when children subsequently attend well-funded early elementary schools. And similarly, the school spending effectiveness in the elementary school years are significantly augmented when they're preceded by access to high-quality pre-K. So there's a lot to kind of unpack and there's a lot of dialogue that I want to have, but I really appreciate the time and opportunity and despite the IT challenges. So let me unmute and certainly share any questions that David has and reconnect with Linda and Jesse, fabulous other panelists. Thank you, Dr. Johnson. That was super. And I'm going to bring the other panelists in, but I'm going to ask my question of you. What's so interesting to me that Jesse was talking about a close to $1,000 increase in spending directed to higher need districts, you were talking about pretty much the same amount in the local control funding formula and adding into that the identification of key expenditure, bringing Linda's point back in key areas of expenditure spending that really isolating those that lead to these gains. I want to ask a little bit of a different question before we get into some of that, which is about the debate over school finance reforms has centered a lot on the over-reliance by states on local property tax revenue to support public education. What's so interesting to me about the California reforms is that you didn't really address the disparities in local revenue between low wealth and more affluent communities, but you focused primarily on increases in state revenue, A, more state money coming in and B, strategically targeting that state revenue to districts with high concentrations of student need and sustaining that over time. That's how I kind of read that. So my question is, can you talk a little bit more about boosting and targeting state revenue as a school reform strategy, as the lever of change in the gains that you're getting in the LCFF reform and the political difficulties in getting states and state legislatures to raise state funding, A, and then allocate it to the communities that are most in need, which are high poverty communities, communities segregated along racial lines and so forth. Can you talk a little bit more about that? So I think you summed it up well. I think the key thing is that we're showing meaningful outcomes when sustained multi-year funding reaches the classroom, particularly in high-need communities. And so for spending practices, you know, basically systematic spending practices of school districts can shape student achievement trajectories. That's the one of the key things we're trying to uncover, and we're saying dollars spent on instructionally centered, whether small class sizes, high teacher salaries, that contribute to reducing teacher turnover. Those have been one of the most significant predictors of these student achievement gains. And so we're kind of trying to say first that we've seen that the achievement gains in policy momentum has been substantially slowed in the pandemic and the remote learning and reversed many of these positive patterns for many students and communities due to the school closings and the challenges of the digital divide. And so what we're really trying to do is then draw out the lessons for how targeting the resources to ensure we regain the traction toward those upward student achievement trajectories and showing it's possible even with some of the more disadvantaged districts. But I would definitely want to invite both Linda and Jesse to weigh in on these pieces. But I would say these aren't things that happen overnight. These are the product of sustained investment. And I'll also just say this, because we're able to disaggregate across districts, districts that had more of their investments in the early elementary school years relative to high school years, we see more gains in the achievement growth and the cumulative nature of learning that early learning begets future learning is what we see. And so when those investments are targeted more in the high school years, it's not so much that they can't be good, but they sometimes can crowd out some of the gains that are critical for the foundation that are laid in the early elementary school years. So I think investing early is one of the key components that we see. And when there's a little bit of a negative correlation, that is the achievement gains are lower for the early elementary school gains in districts that allocated more of the resources to middle and high schools. All right, well, let's get into it. Linda, you want to jump in? I can see. Yes, I'm muted. Okay. As a former high school teacher, I want to stand up for the high school investments, which we don't do as much testing in the high school, so we don't have a lot of data, but they do show up, I think often in graduation rates as well. But your point is we'll take it about early investment. I do want to just say one thing about California. Those investments that Rutgers has been describing are enormous. More than in the last three years, which kind of precede some of these data because of the pandemic lag in testing, but we've put more than 30% more new money into the LCFF formula on a more equitable basis. And what we saw with the NAPE data that just was recently released is that California was one of the few states that did not fall back in reading. In fact, we held steady in eighth grade reading and had very little change in fourth grade reading and fell back less than other states in math. And then using state data, we see that between 2021 and 2022, the kids who were tested in both years had a much steeper gain than was true in pre-pandemic years. So this kind of investment, even when you have some setbacks, can make a difference in the degree to which that setback occurs and also the degree of acceleration that's possible once things are beginning to get back into the groove. So I think if we continue to see the gains at the rate we saw them last year for the kids who were tested in both years, we will rapidly catch up to and exceed the achievement levels that we were at even a few years ago. So I just want to note that even in times of difficulty, you can see these differences across the states. And that's what raises the question about the reform. Rutgers stopped at 2020 in terms of the investments. Where do we go from here in California? Well, we've just in these last couple of years, we put in 24 billion in a variety of three, four billion for community schools, big increases in the local control funding formula, which is very important. Rutgers first paper that we published with LPI was published in his economics journal, but we also published the version for policymakers. And it's got something about freedom to spend. What was the title, Rutger? But the point that it's general fund money, right? It's not categorical money is important because you've got to be able to figure out how to, you know, put it in the right places. But on top of that, we've done community school money investments in educator recruitment and retention, investments in afterschool and summer school programming. So it's we're going to see the results of that. And that's what I think we're seeing in this most recent state data. You're seeing this very substantial rate of gain increase in achievement. And just real quick to what role did this, the data that Rutger was talking about about the gains and the places to spend and the need for more increases play in the political process to get the to continue increasing that funding. How important was that that state specific data? I think it's important. You know, we're in a California bubble with Democrats running against Democrats because of our rank footing system. You know, there's a very substantial progressive impulse with a very proactive governor right now and a legislature that has been also proactive. But there's still always these questions about where you're going to put the money. And knowing the value of these investments is important. And it'll be even more important if the politics shifts as, you know, often happens in states to be able to continue to to track that. And also these investments in TK, there's been a lot of question about should we slow it down? You know, should we, you know, continue to lean in? And having these data are very important. But Jesse, I'm going to ask you to take us into a question, which is where do we go from here in terms of this research generally? You talked a little bit about the new frontier. I think you called it in one of the slides. And then, you know, I'll get you to start this out. And I'll be interested to see what Linda and Rutger have to say about it. But and can you talk a little bit? I think what's come up for me a lot is what I was just, Linda and I were just talking about, which is, how do we get this data down to the state level and district level so that it can, it actually can inform policy development in particular states and in places. And also, more importantly, the political process of actually getting these increased investments approved by and often by state legislatures and governors that are not that sympathetic to making these types of investments. Okay, thanks. There are a bunch of questions in there. Let me try to take the first one. And I think maybe want to jump in on the rest. So what do I see as kind of the research frontier or what are some of the frontiers that we might want to be thinking about? I would say that there's been this kind of divide between there's this 30,000 foot research that I talked about, about trying to answer the question, does money matter? And then there's really on the ground research in schools trying to understand what the processes, what happens in schools. And there hasn't been that much work connecting them. And so one of the questions I mentioned during my presentation is what goes on with spending, with the distribution of spending across schools within districts. I think that's one of the frontiers is to try to understand that, try to understand what policies can ensure that funding is targeted to the schools that are in most need within districts. But the other is a question that I often get and that's come up in the Q&A and that I don't have a great answer to is, okay, well, what should we tell the schools to do with the money? If we've given them more funding, what should we do with it? And the 30,000 foot work can't really answer that. And I think we need another research frontier is what can you do at the state level, at the system level to increase the proportion of the funding that is spent on the kind of most effective uses? How can you help? How can you do that? I think traditionally, the way we did that was with formula funds, which ended up just becoming a giant complicated mess where districts got so many different formulas that were very restricted and really couldn't spend money flexibly to meet the needs that they had. But is there a way to combine flexibility with incentives or encouragement or information that helps schools and districts figure out how to spend the money most effectively? So I would say those are two that I'm interested in. I'm curious what the other panelists think about this. Yeah, I guess I would just add that, in addition to what Jesse is highlighting here, what an unappreciated aspect of the new ESSA feature is the reporting requirement. That is the earliest, every student succeeds at reporting requirement that spending be reported at the school level. And so the ESCA provision allows districts to experiment weighted student funding formulas. But importantly, the student level, the school reporting data, I think gives us some potential in the future to do more on the intra-district resource allocation. And using the data to help students achieve, not just system management or compliance issues, but again, as I was trying to partner with the California Department of Education to build information systems that link the spending to segregation, integration, and student outcomes by school so that we can celebrate, as Linda often says, the positive outliers. That is, celebrate the productivity superstars and adopt that innovation that has proven success and try to export those best practices. And I'm not saying there's one style of best practice because every district has some slightly different needs, but I think there are some systematic general patterns that I'm already seeing in the data about certain spending patterns being more predictive of student achievement gains. And I think that's the kind of clarity that I was trying to kind of zoom in on in the work that I've been doing so far. And again, part of it is some of it's due to things that are out of school factors, including the access to quality pre-K that precedes the kindergarten entry. So those are all things that are complemented in a kind of more synergistic way, as opposed to thinking of the school resource piece as a panacea by itself. Right. And just to kind of augment, you know, you've made the point in a number of your studies that you see improvements to teacher quality as a key part of that level. Also, when we did a positive outlier study, we did find that the one of the strongest predictors of district level achievement for controlling for both household income and student other and school funding was the proportion of teachers who are fully prepared, because in California, we have a lot of teachers who are not. So you have enough variation that you can really see the end. I just maybe want to have one quick thing is that a lot of our attention is often about how students and family backgrounds sort into schools of different types. And I think that's definitely important for student segregation and school segregation and the like. But I would say that there needs to be a little bit more attention to how teachers are sorting into schools of different quality and how the resource supports provided actually connect and fuel more teacher retention in higher poverty districts. And so thinking about how the resources affect the not just the recruitment but the retainment and development of high quality teachers in those districts. And I would just say without this longitudinal data following the same students as they begin kindergarten all the way through their K 12 years is central to the findings that I was reporting today using district aggregates and where the composition of schools can change in ways that that go undetected. That's actually a significant way in which you can miss some of the actual gains that are having are happening because the composition of schools has this kind of sorting mechanism where people are sorting out of many of the under resource middle schools. And so you have to kind of follow the same students to be able to make sure you're actually picking up the school effect and not the parental sorting and parental choice. And remember parental choice school choice is really dependent on parental well. Your ability to actually exercise that choice is often mediated by having the parental well to be able to access different housing options that low income families often don't have. So when you when we just raises the question of if you think about the state's constitutional obligation to in their state constitutions to maintain and support a system of free public schools. That has to include from my point of view the state's obligation to ensure not only that it has adequate funding that provides adequate funding to the schools but also that it has firm controls over local school districts in terms of the effective and efficient use of those funds to do what right to ensure that kids achieve right to better outcomes. So where are we with all of this work in terms of what state frameworks would are with state policy frameworks for getting the right mix of both discretion flexibility but also control to make sure that funding gets to the as I think Jesse was talking about gets to where it's needed most. Not just the districts but down into schools and into those specific expenditures which you're all talking about there's four or five key expenditures that areas that that your research is telling us has a big effect. Where do we stand with that? Are we still stuck between the old debate about categorical funding and formula funding and flexibility and you know and just throwing it all in the pot let local educators figure it out so forth and so on. It's so different from state to state it's hard to say anything about where we are that you know would be generalizable but I think that there are multiple mechanisms for calling attention to certain things. So one of them can be categoricals and you know in California we got to the point where my predecessor on the state board my cursed used to call it the hardening of the categoricals. You had all these little programs and you could get $2.98 per child you know for a music program but you couldn't do anything with it because you couldn't buy anything with that amount of money you know you know all these little and it got to the point where you didn't have enough to do some of the core things which is you've got to have adequate teacher salaries if you're going to recruit and retain you know educators you can't spend it all on you know programs that legislators put their names on. So we we certainly learned that lesson but there is also clear that you need to help direct people and give them capacity. So sometimes substantial categoricals like preschool might could be considered a substantial categorical or you know community school supports which we're doing on a large scale so that people learn how to do the integrated student supports and so on you know sometimes will make sense but you've got to be careful that it doesn't evolve back to a place where you can't do the core work of schooling and allow local educators to make good choices about what their community needs but the other tool we have are innovative and thoughtful accountability and reporting systems. So for example in in California we have and many several other states have a way of tracking whether kids are getting access to college and career programs college preparatory courses curriculum you know career technical programs of high quality and it directs resources there we now have on our dashboard for the first time qualifications of teachers and so if you are as some districts are have many many teachers who are not qualified to teach what they're teaching may not be have any preparation at all that shows up and it then incentivizes investments on things that are important even things like school climate surveys which tell you whether kids feel like they are being supported in good ways in school and you know given the right kinds of you know sort of restorative practices and so on can help direct things direct educators attention to the things that we know matter and we have a system in California that requires annual attention to those data points those reporting in the state priorities about how kids are progressing and how they're progressing by group and how they're doing on these different dimensions so strategic thinking about what those indicators are can also be an alternative to categoricals that also directs funding in some useful directions. I would just add one thing to that which is that it's not it doesn't have to be purely a dichotomy of flexibility versus categorical especially in in kind of new situations like the response to COVID there I think there's room for states to provide guidance that's not coercive about about how funding is most effectively spent and I think that would be a that's a way of kind of getting in between those two extremes that could be useful and one of the things about categoricals is also that they're yes in the in the old version they might come and go and so you don't know how much you're going to have from your year and so so to Jesse's point one of the strategies we now have for high poverty schools is that they're all getting funding on a regular basis for expanded learning time in summer school so it is a categorical but it's a sustained large dependable categorical that was your in response to COVID but we'll continue now beyond. And I think that's the key is like when the funding sources and quantity of that funding is uncertain it changes how district leaders make those decisions about the investment so when it's a reoccurring expense like teacher salaries and I'm trying to speak to a question Matt Barnum may have heard said in the chat that maybe miss and I may have expressed wrong but what I was trying to say was that the increase in teacher salaries the reductions in class size are factors that actually lead to lower teacher turnover and that in combination leads to greater achievement gains and you want to remember that one in five school public school teachers leave the profession within the first five years but in high poverty districts it can be as high as one in two yeah leaving the district within the first five years that's leaving in its vacuum a great a significant cadre of inexperienced teachers that don't often have the teaching certification and as Linda was speaking to so that's why I'm saying where the money can make a difference where the district allocates more of to instructional expenditures because the system is committing those funds more than one year at a time that makes a difference in how it's spent so sometimes we blame the district to use it inappropriately but part of it is is it going to be a sustained commitment and you could make a decision today for the COVID revenue that you're going to like replace outdated ventilation systems that are often huge contagion factories for the pandemic for COVID spread that would be a great use of the funding because of the conditions that we're in and because of the outdated infrastructure that many of the school facilities suffer in a lot of the high poverty urban districts so that just means like you have to be attentive to you know every yeah that's a really good point because you know often we talk about how you know investing in instruction shows more marginal gain but you do have to invest in facilities sometimes you do have to do these other things and you don't want to have kids you know in unsafe environments while you're ignoring that the other thing I just want to note on this question of investing for example in teacher quality is that in the states that I was highlighting very quickly they put more money into teachers compensation at the same time that they raised the standards for teacher preparation and licensure and often you know did other things around you know mentoring and and evaluation and so on so you want to be buying high quality teachers you know as you're making that investment who then also stay because those things together as Rucker was saying turn into much stronger achievement you lose achievement with lots of churn but you got to do all the pieces together right you've got to think about the system so Rucker raised the yes or money and the spending of the COVID relief funds by school districts I'm going to raise sort of asking all to jump in on the question of federal funding and federal policy first is about this huge infusion of one time non-recurring relief funds into schools districts are still spending it they've got a while to go but it's going to run out we saw a and I think some of the slideshows a disinvestment that occurred after the last time the federal government did this during the great recession like you all to sort of comment on what do we need to do to raise the alarm that just beneath the surface of this infusion of federal funds are as I think all of you talked about state systems that are still under financed that have not undergone through underfunded have not gone through these reforms and in states where you know money has been put in that they continue to sustain those investments over time so that's one question then the other question is what federal policies changes could really actually incentivize and support the kinds of reforms that you're talking about by states because right now they don't seem to be really doing that so I'll just throw that out to all of you go ahead I know that's a lot but I think I'll take the second question first and then others deal with the first question but you know over time you're back in the 60s there was a lot of really systemic approach 60s and 70s to federal education funding you know so the big reforms all came then when Lyndon Johnson who was a public school teacher before he became president did you know the ESCA the elementary secondary education act we got the education for all handicapped children act at that time and so on but in the years since and as you know the spending has been tamped down you've got a lot of categorical programs that are small and they're directed to individual schools like you could apply and get a little bit of money to be you know a magnet school or to do your social program that's very non-systemic and you know doesn't have a lot of you know leverage effect on the system so we should be looking for the federal government to be doing more systemic approaches with matching grants to states that get states involved in doing the work themselves that's what the preschool initiatives would be like if the Build Back Better you know comes along where you're building systems in states with federal help the same way you built the highway system so you're thinking about it as a system and you're encouraging and incentivizing states to participate as partners in building a system not school by school not heard by bird little tiny you know programs that you apply for and so we're seeing some of that in this administration kind of beginning to move in a more thoughtful direction but there's a long way to go yeah we talked about sorry we talked about the difficulty of categorical restriction that the state level and how those end up not working very well because they end up just with a thousand different restrictions that the districts have to follow that becomes even more of a problem at the federal level where they're giving a much smaller share of the money because I think you know on the order of 10% of the funding and often trying to micromanage the education process with that without much connection to the actual education process so I would favor the federal government trying to really dial back its efforts to to micromanage the process matching grants are a perfectly fine way of doing things to encourage things but you but you can't try to try to exert leverage beyond the amount of funding that you're that you're providing with one exception and I think the exception is that we've talked a lot about these state financial forms that govern the distribution of funding within states but there's also a problem that there's pretty big disparities in funding across states and there are some states that are kind of persistently just not spending enough on their schools and I think that there would be room to use federal funding to try to encourage more spending in those states in some cases it's because the states just don't have the money to spend and I think the federal government should be doing more to try to create power equalization across states as well like states do within but in other cases they have the money and they're not spending it and I think that that some more matching approaches to the federal funding could be a way of trying to encourage that I think you're Jesse you're saying that we the federal government at least with respect to maybe title one and funds like that shouldn't just be handing it over agnostic if you will to whether the state is making an effort to adequately fund its financing system because then it's just going in to subsidize an unequal system basically right to create some metrics by which we could sort of push states to to to step up to the plate and make and make effort consistent with their fiscal capacity is that your point exactly exactly and right now the there is sort of an incentive in title one allocations that make them hire if you're spending more maybe it would be more appropriate to make that dependent on effort rather than you know output so we don't have we've got less than 10 minutes left and I gotta ask about the segregation issue I want to get into that you know you all talked about that it's kind of a bit of a double whammy right so kids get less funding and they're also in districts that are highly segregated they also don't get the advantage of being the opportunity for being educated in diverse learning environments you know we're in a multiracial multicultural society now even more so and that's going to continue to go forward and the whole issue of thinking about reforms that not only include giving which I think is what you all are talking about here today making sure that kids in districts that are segregated by poverty and race get everything they need today in order to succeed that's that's that's the sort of sum and substance of the the reforms that you're talking about but also what about the issue the role of of of segregation both socioeconomic and racial and how that compounds the disadvantage and have you all sort of started to think about how do we combine have to make a combined effort to get more diversity in our schools and more socioeconomic and racial diversity in our schools while at the same time making sure that kids that are in segregated schools today because of various state policies and histories and practices and so forth and so on get what they need I know that's a big question but I'm going to throw it out there anyone wants to try it go ahead one point and I'll point some folks well first of all I already mentioned Rutgers book so read children of the dream but in addition we've got a few papers at lpi on the question of how the federal government went from being proactively supportive of desegregation in the 60s and 70s to being assertively against it in the way that it has managed litigation in the way that there were prohibitions to spending federal funds for transportation you know for students etc those things are beginning to crumble a little bit we now can spend it they're adding money to the magnet schools for inter-district transfers as well as within districts but there's a lot more that's going to be needed but literally the federal government has been one of the biggest obstacles to segregation in the last few decades because they shifted their stance on the legislative front as well as the judicial front let me let me ask the question this way to to rucker and jesse see if they want to weigh in on this you know can we add to this research such as the research you're talking about with the local local control finance formula to lift up the the impact of intense segregation by poverty and race in schools as an element that create you know obviously creates achievement gaps i mean jesse you were talking about we can shrink the gap but how do we go further and can we lift up the issue of that that's segregated factor here and start to have a conversation at least with state legislatures and governors about policies that consign kids to these segregated schools and what can we really do about public school choice to give kids more opportunities to attend schools that are socioeconomic and racially diverse particularly at the middle and high school level any any thoughts about that yes i definitely have thoughts okay go i think the first thing is that we generally think of like school resource equity through school funding reforms as like one thing in school integration as like an alternative and i think what we're trying to say is these are complementary and importantly have synergists synergies that actually when we accept the high levels of prevailing segregation in our schools the school funding reform efforts that we have to do to overcome that level of segregation is way more expensive that the funding formula that we introduced in california probably wouldn't be politically palatable or feasible in many other more conservative state legislatures what i would say is that when you have high concentrations of poverty the amount of redistribution that's requisite to achieve equal educational opportunity is raised significantly but also note you can't have significant integration efforts as long as the most concentrated poverty schools the schools that have significant numbers of racial and ethnic minorities are the ones that are under resource that are the ones that are under invested because middle class families that have more options are not going to choose school systems that are under resource so until you kind of make efforts toward the school resource equity you can't really expect middle class families with options to continually choose more diverse school environment so i think you have to have both the school resource equity to make school integration efforts viable and you have to have the school integration efforts to make the level of school resource redistribution for equal education opportunity to become a reality i don't think you can actually do one without the other or the other i think you have to do both and the only thing i would add is you have to start early so that means that you have to do both of those things and start in the pre-k years and then you have a system that can lead to not just what's good for a minority students in a zero sum game but a way that actually boosts the attainment the diverse diverse kind of outcomes that you know linda talked about with john dewy's quote is what we're after aspirationally after which is beyond test scores toward building leaders that can lead diverse multicultural democracy that was really what is missing and we're not going to get there by thinking we can just money our way out of it without redesigning the system toward integrating integration as a component do anyone else want to jump in on that i want to give jessia a chance if he wants to go ahead linda okay i was just going to say that you know starting early as as rucker said you need to design preschool for example so that it is available to all families in an integrated way we know that integrated multilingual and multicultural preschool is more effective but also you've got to design for that if you just say low income kids go to head start and high income kids go to over here and so then you're not going to get there and the same thing is true for k-12 school so we're very proactive about thinking about that as we're designing our new universal preschool in california and that some of that may mean augmenting federally funded programs with sliding scales at some point for folks who have more money some of it's going to be universal where you can afford to do it for everybody in an integrated way allowing people to choose settings that are close to their job as well as close to their neighborhood because neighborhoods are so segregated there's a lot of factors you got to think about to start to build an integrated schooling system you've also got to allow for attractive choice public school choice across boundaries of districts and you know some places like connecticut have done that in the hartford plan and massachusetts has done some of that but that's going to be a state responsibility you can't leave that to local districts which have been the result of lots of illegal redlining and you know covenants and all the rest of it there's just a new law to get all the racially based covenants out of the land records that's going to take like multiple fte's of people multiple years just to get rid of the language so just to give us a sense of how much history we have to overcome but we've got to be designing for it in everything we do you want to so i think i agree with the last word here sure i agree with everything the other two panelists said i would say in general like we haven't really for the last 20 years we haven't really tried particularly to achieve integrated schools and so it's not surprising we haven't done very well and i think certainly trying we don't we don't have none of us has a one size fits all solution about how to do it but i think if we try we can accomplish more i would say part of the trying is going to have to be outside of the school system that we have to address housing segregation before to achieve much progress on school segregation and that's a big issue that's probably you need another panel to discuss but yeah well i'll put my sort of lawyer and advocacy hat on you know i think what you're all saying is that we are conception of what the right to education means is too narrow it's either it's either integration we've had people on one side talking about integrated schools and desegregation and on the other side about you know um what i'll call you know equity you know in place equity and separate and apart from each other and i think the time is i think what you're both you're all saying is it's time to start to think more broadly about the state's obligations to provide an education and it's got to include giving kids the opportunity to attend schools that are more diverse today i mean i think that's critical in addition to to to providing equity and the other thing is that it's the historical historical project nature of all of this right so i think you've all talked about sustained over a long haul because these are not one-offs they're not episodic they have to be their projects right they have to be sustained over over the long haul so i'm going to stop there i think we've reached the end of oh we could keep going uh but we've reached the end of our time i i just want to thank all all three of you for an amazing discussion just really powerful great the research you've brought forward is just just incredibly important keep going we need you need you all to keep going um and give us and give the advocates out there the tools that they need to be able to go into their state houses and local school boards and get the changes that they need to be made so i want to thank you all for taking for for for doing this for us and you know you know we'll have to uh jessie we'll have to set up another another session and keep going so thanks a lot to all three of you and thanks to everybody who joined and and we'll have a have a great day for us to the day thank you for having us