Immigration and Spending on Public Education: California, 1970–-2000

The evolution of education spending in California has received much attention from both academics and practitioners after education …finance reform in the 1970’s. This paper quantifies the contribution of immigration to the relative decline in elementary and secondary public education spending per student in California between 1970 and 2000. A quantitative model of school choice and voting over public education is used to perform the counterfactual experiment. The model predicts that education spending per student in California would have been 24 percent higher than in reality in the year 2000 if U.S. immigration had been restricted to its 1970 level.