Economics of Education - Assignment Example

In a sequence of items over the past ten years, Hanushek used 38 different pieces of writing and put focus on: pupil/teacher ratio, education and experience of the teacher, teacher’s salary, Per Pupil Expenditure (PPE), administrative inputs and facilities. He reviews the evidence of a large number of studies basing on their views of the relationship between spending and school performance. He conducted vote-count based on aggregating 187 studies in 38 separately published books where in each publication there are several regression equations.

He classified the relation between each input variable and an output variable into one of five categories according to the direction of the regression coefficient's sign (positive or negative) and its statistical significance (significant or non-significant). The fifth is coefficients that were non-significant but for which it was impossible to determine the direction of the coefficient's sign from the reported results. His conclusion is that money doesn’t matter as school’s output is concerned (Hanushek 150-164).

Hedges et al study This study is a reanalysis of the evidence examined by Hanushek. These researchers found that a “systematic positive patterns in the relationships between educational resource inputs and student outcomes” exists. . This study declared that the pattern of results given in Hanushek’s vote count is not consistent with the null hypothesis of no effect in every study and thus making a type II error in his statistical analysis due to the low power associated with vote counting.

Hedges et al used more sophisticated procedures to aggregate the information in the different studies and corrects some problems that were found in Hanushek’s methodology where they came up with a conclusion which clearly states that “Money does matter after all”. This directly differs with Hanushek’s conclusion. These two studies attempted to highlight the relationship between inputs and outputs of schools with an essence of improving American educational system. However, all of these researches there was no consensus established as to which course should be followed or even on the need for additional expenditures to produce the desired improvements, instead, some scholars have questioned whether there is a relation between the amount of resources and level of accomplishment of students in schools.

Hanushek used vote counting analytic method. For a given resource input, the "result" of each study is the estimated partial regression coefficient of the resource input to student output, holding constant the family background and other inputs. The vote-counting methodology tabulates these results according to the sign (positive, negative, or unknown) and the statistical significance (significant or non-significant, usually at ?= .05 level) of the results. The category with the most results (the most "votes") is generally taken to represent the true state of the relation in