The 5 Billion Dollar McCleary Act: Do Changes in Expenditure Improve Student Outcomes?
A map of K-12 education spending by County:
In my junior year at Western Washington University, for Econ 407: Topics in Microeconomics, I identified a natural experiment. In 2017 Washington suddenly changed how it funded K-12 schools. I conducted an econometrics study examining whether increased public school spending in Washington State improved student performance. The results suggested reverse causality: school funding tended to increase in response to declining performance, rather than driving improvement. There was no evidence that more funding improved a student’s outcomes.
While the project was ambitious for my skill level at the time (2022, when I was just beginning to learn data science), the research question remains important. I include this study here as an example of my early work in applied econometrics and my interest in policy.