Intergovernmental Finance and School Staffing Practices in the United States

• In Event: Teachers and Education Politics

Abstract

In the United States, the number of non-instructional staff has increased since 1950 at seven times the rate the number of students (Scafidi, 2013). What role does local control of school districts play in driving this change? We present two competing theories of the effects of local control: in the first, when schools are funded from local sources, districts will hire more teachers rather than administrators, as they will want to have a more productive education system. In the alternative, when schools are funded from local sources, districts will hire more noninstructional staff, as they are more likely to come from the local community. To investigate these competing theories, we exploit, as a source of exogenous variation, court-mandated school finance reforms which, by increasing the amount of state funds available to school districts, are expected to alter district staffing levels. We also explore how these shocks interact with collective bargaining and the regulation of the education professions in each state. We employ an event-study design that looks at the effects of school finance reforms on changes in staff/pupil ratios by staff categories. Additionally, we will be able to look at possible mechanisms by relating local control of revenue with attitudes towards the education system and towards different professionals in a proprietary survey of the US public. Lastly, we are able to relate these changes to student outcomes in NAEP test scores. With this research we are able to provide novel answers to questions about the consequences of local control of schools to their operations under different state regulatory environments for staffing, and what the downstream consequences of these alternative staffing practices are for student outcomes.

Authors

• Carlos Xabel Lastra Anadon

• Paul E. Peterson, Harvard University