Lavy, Victor (2012) Expanding school resources and increasing time on task : effects of a policy experiment in Israel on student academic achievement and behavior. Working Paper. Coventry, UK: Department of Economics, University of Warwick. CAGE Online Working Paper Series, Volume 2012 (Number 95).

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Abstract

In this paper, I examine how student academic achievements and behavior were affected by a school finance policy
experiment undertaken in elementary schools in Israel. Begun in 2004, the funding formula changed from a budget
set per class to a budget set per student, with more weight given to students from lower socioeconomic and lower
educational backgrounds. The experiment altered teaching budgets, the length of the school week, and the
allocation of time devoted to core subjects. The results suggest that spending more money and spending more time
at school and on key tasks all lead to increasing academic achievements with no behavioral costs. I find that the
overall budget per class has positive and significant effects on students' average test scores and that this effect is
symmetric and identical for schools that gained or lost resources due to the funding reform. Separate estimations of
the effect of increasing the length of the school week and the subject-specific instructional time per week also show
positive and significant effects on math, science, and English test scores. However, no cross effects of additional
instructional time across subjects emerge, suggesting that the effect of overall weekly school instruction time on
test scores reflects only the effect of additional instructional time in these particular subjects. As a robustness check
of the validity of the identification strategy, I also use an alternative method that exploits variation in the instruction
time of different subjects. Remarkably, this alternative identification strategy yields almost identical results to the
results obtained based on the school funding reform. Additional results suggest that the effect on test scores is
similar for boys and girls but it is much larger for pupils from low socioeconomic backgrounds and it is also more
pronounced in schools populated with students from homogenous socioeconomic backgrounds. The evidence also
shows that a longer school week increases the time that students spend on homework without reducing social and
school satisfaction and without increasing school violence.

Item Type:	Working or Discussion Paper (Working Paper)
Subjects:	L Education > LB Theory and practice of education > LB1501 Primary Education
Divisions:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Economics
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	Education, Elementary -- Research -- Israel , Education -- Finance, Education -- Study and teaching -- Israel
Series Name:	CAGE Online Working Paper Series
Publisher:	Department of Economics, University of Warwick
Place of Publication:	Coventry, UK
Official Date:	August 2012
Dates:	Date Event August 2012 Published
Volume:	Volume 2012
Number:	Number 95
Number of Pages:	45
Institution:	University of Warwick
Status:	Not Peer Reviewed
Publication Status:	Published
Access rights to Published version:	Open Access (Creative Commons)
Date of first compliant deposit:	1 August 2016
Date of first compliant Open Access:	1 August 2016

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