<P> In most countries school education is predominantly financed and provided by governments . Public funding and provision also plays a major role in higher education . Although there is wide agreement on the principle that education, at least at school level, should be financed mainly by governments, there is considerable debate over the desirable extent of public provision of education . Supporters of public education argue that universal public provision promotes equality of opportunity and social cohesion . Opponents of public provision advocate alternatives such as vouchers . </P> <P> Compared to other areas of basic education, globally comparable data on pre-primary education financing remain scarce . While much of existing non-formal and private programmes may not be fully accounted for, it can be deduced from the level of provision that pre-primary financing remains inadequate, especially when considered against expected benefits . Globally, pre-primary education accounts for the lowest proportion of the total public expenditure on education, in spite of the much - documented positive impact of quality early childhood care and education on later learning and other social outcomes . </P> <P> 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 . Later work, by Eric A. Hanushek, Richard Murnane, and other economists introduced the structure of "production" to the consideration of student learning outcomes . Hanushek at al. (2008, 2015) reported a very high correlation between "adjusted growth rate" and "adjusted test scores". </P> <P> 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 . 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 . Additionally, policy discussions about class size reduction heightened academic study of the relationship of class size and achievement . </P>

The birth of economics of education was announced by whom