Having established that court-mandated reforms, on average, affected school spending differently in different kinds of districts, we use more detailed information about the specific reforms enacted in each state to “predict” reform-induced spending changes for each district nationwide. That is, we ignore what actually occurred in a given district and instead calculate what would have been expected to occur based on the experiences of all other districts with similar characteristics experiencing the same kind of reform. We can therefore be confident that these predicted spending changes are unrelated to any unobserved changes in that particular district that may have influenced both school spending and adult outcomes.
