Three major political trends, one article of faith and one over-arching assumption define education in the United States.

The first trend is the pursuit of equity in outcomes. Outcomes are assumed to be dependent on equity in funding and equity in funding has been pursued in the Courts. Scholars refer to three waves of “School Finance Litigation” which are described in Section 1. School finance lawsuits were argued in Massachusetts in all three waves and the reforms that started in the early 1990s were in part court ordered reforms.

The article of faith is that smaller class sizes improve outcomes. Since teachers are the main education cost this belief leads to higher costs per pupil, which lead to higher property taxes and result in the second political trend: taxpayer revolt manifested in the adoption of caps on property taxes. Section 2 presents evidence.

The third trend is the demand for “results” and “accountability”. Outcomes are widely believed to have worsened, although the evidence, given in Section 3, is not at all clear-cut. “Accountability” movements seek to use testing and test results as a means of holding children, parents, teachers and administrators responsible for educational outcomes. Section 4 describes the failure of “Accountability” reforms in the 1970’s. “Accountability” reform, upgraded and re-branded as “Standards” reform, was a component of the reforms in Massachusetts.

Educational Production Function Research, considered in Section 5, has assumed, from the Coleman Report onwards, that Educational outcomes are strongly related to Socio-Economic Status (“SES”).

Educational Production Function Research has produced little else in the way of statistically significant relationships between outcomes (“outputs”) and “inputs”. Where a relationship is alleged to exist little is known and even less is proven about the direction of causation.

A key component of both Educational Production Function Research and Standards based reforms is measurement of educational outcomes. Measurement is very problematic for a number of reasons. Section 6 looks briefly at the problems and issues in measurement and the use of test scores in research.