More School Spending Won't Help Your Schools

The charts show it, and the data prove it. In the US, more school spending won't increase your students' performance significantly (in most cases anyway).

Why? We'll talk about that another time.

Reading:

(NAEP reading scores from 2005 compared to average annual per-student instructional spending 2002-2005; each dot indicates a US state or the D.C. Red lines indicate "cut scores" for rating individual performance--Basic, Proficient, and Advanced. Click the image to see a larger version.)

Math:

(NAEP nath scores from 2005 compared to average annual per-student instructional spending 2002-2005; each dot indicates a US state or the D.C. Red lines indicate "cut scores" for rating individual performance--Basic, Proficient, and Advanced. Click the image to see a larger version.)

Data:
You can get the data I used from these US government web sites:
http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/
http://www.census.gov/govs/www/school.html

See my earlier blog posts here and here
for a discussion of methodology.