The Two-Legged Stool: The Neglected Role of Educational Standards in Improving America's Public Schools

wo of the most important reforms to American public schooling in this century have been an increase in the minimum school-leaving age and a dramatic increase in expenditures per pupil. The former reform has generally been hailed as a success, given evidence that an extra year of schooling significantly boosts students' earnings later in life. However , evidence on the effectiveness of the trend toward higher spending per pupil, smaller class sizes, and more highly educated and trained teachers is much more mixed. A host of studies on the link between school finances and test scores has not shown a systematic link between spending and achievement. Another set of studies tests whether higher school spending leads to higher earnings for students later in life. The findings in this body of work are also mixed: even the most optimistic results suggest a very low rate of return to increased school expenditures. Given the central role of public schools in preparing younger generations for the workforce and the sizable expenditures devoted to public schools, it becomes important to ask whether other reforms might increase the effectiveness of public schooling. The premise of this paper is that educational standards are a key element in school reform. The paper suggests that the twin policies of higher school-leaving ages and higher spending would have been much more effective if accompanied by systematic increases in educational standards. In a sense, these two policies form a two-legged stool. Increasing the number of years that students must spend in school and increasing spending per pupil—without at the same time stipulating what subject matter students should have mastered by each age— are unlikely to maximize the rate at which students learn. The missing " leg " in these past reforms is a set of academic standards against which both students and Julian R. Betts is a professor of economics at the