Abstract

The relationship between school resources and student achievement has been controversial, in large part because it calls into question a variety of traditional policy approaches. This article reviews the available educational production literature, updating previous summaries. The close to 400 studies of student achievement demonstrate that there is not a strong or consistent relationship between stu-dent performance and school resources, at least after variations in family inputs are taken into ac-count. These results are also reconciled with meta-analytic approaches and with other investigations on how school resources affect labor market outcomes. Simple resource policies hold little hope for improving student outcomes. Reflecting its policy significance, an enormous amount of research has focused on the relationship between resources devoted to schools and student performance. Recent interest generated by current policy debates has helped clarify both the interpretation of this work and the resulting policy implications. This article updates previ-