Editor’s Note

One of our sharp-eyed readers lately informed us that the article published by William Owings and Leslie Kaplan, titled “The Alpha and Omega Syndrome: Is Intra-District Funding the Next Ripeness Factor?” published in Volume 36, Issue 2, pages 162–185, 2010, had inadvertently omitted quotation marks that did not give appropriate credit to a previously published article by Dennis Condron and Vincent Roscigno titled, “Disparities within: Unequal Spending and Achievement in an Urban School District” in the journal, Sociology of Education, Issue 1, Volume 76, page 18–36 (2003).

The lines where omissions of quotation marks occurred were as follows in italics:

Studies by educational researchers, economists, and sociologists reach conflicting conclusions on whether “money matters” in student achievement. Some studies find that spending promotes achievement while others have suggested that money matters little, particularly once a number of other factors are taken into consideration…

[End Page 164]

Several meta-analyses have attempted to clarify the association … Summing up the results of production-function research and meta-analyses,…suggests that "the results…have been mixed, fueling, rather than resolving, the debate on whether money matters to achievement"…. Money matters to student achievement, sometimes. As a consequence, more recent work has shifted from the question of “whether” money matters to”how” money may promote achievement through the purchase of specific resources.

Researchers have identified several financially driven factors that improve student achievement. These include instructional per-student expenditures … smaller classes …, hiring highly educated teachers with regular access to instructional resources…and teacher quality and class size…. Thus, while past research has not definitively concluded that financial resources are directly linked to achievement, more recent work has clearly suggested that specific attributes of schools may be important mediators between spending and student achievement

(Condron and Roscigno 2003).

Please note this error in your copy of JEF and be sure that proper credit is given to the Condron and Roscigno article.