CULTURE AND SOCIETY, HEALTH AND NUTRITION, WATER, ENERGY, AND THE ENVIRONMENT, EDUCATION
An education production function is an application of the economic concept of a production function to the field of education. It relates various inputs affecting a student's learning (schools, families, peers, neighborhoods, etc.) to measured outputs including subsequent labor market success, college attendance, graduation rates, and, most frequently, standardized test scores. The original study that eventually prompted interest in the idea of education production functions was by a sociologist, James S. Coleman. The Coleman Report, published in 1966, concluded that the marginal effect of various school inputs on student achievement was small compared to the impact of families and friends.[34] Later work, by Eric A. Hanushek, Richard Murnane, and other economists introduced the structure of "production" to the consideration of student learning outcomes. Hanushek et al. (2008, 2015) reported a very high correlation between "adjusted growth rate" and "adjusted test scores"
A large number of successive studies, increasingly involving economists, produced inconsistent results about the impact of school resources on student performance, leading to considerable controversy in policy discussions.[36][37] The interpretation of the various studies has been very controversial, in part because the findings have directly influenced policy debates. Two separate lines of study have been particularly widely debated. The overall question of whether added funds to schools are likely to produce higher achievement (the “money doesn’t matter” debate) has entered into legislative debates and court consideration of school finance systems.[38][39][40] Additionally, policy discussions about class size reduction heightened academic study of the relationship of class size and achievement
