The State Higher Education Finance (SHEF) report is produced annually by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO) to broaden understanding of the context and consequences of public policy decisions in each state that contribute to public higher education funding levels and funding distributions across states and…

In order to inform the Indiana State Board of Education's decision-making on Indiana's On My Way Pre-K Pilot program, researchers at the Center for Evaluation and Education Policy (CEEP) at Indiana University compiled existing data on ten states that have implemented pilot pre-Kindergarten (pre-K) programs and subsequently expanded these programs…

Many Chicagoans are getting shortchanged, particularly when it comes to money exchange between the Illinois Lottery (IL) and Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE). A significant portion of lottery sales is earmarked for education in Illinois. Because these revenues are not generated equally, however, some contribute more to education via the…

In the era of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, school districts are under increasing pressure from policymakers to hold all students to high performance standards. In response, a growing number of schools are embracing the principles of student-centered learning (SCL). SCL is a contemporary approach that combines progressive and…

A consensus is emerging among researchers who study charter schools that general conclusions about whether or not charter schools nationally perform better than traditional public schools are difficult to achieve (Buddin & Zimmer, 2005). Rather than asking, "Are charter schools working?" the better questions to ask might be,…

Over the past decade, public universities' expenditures for research and public service activities have increased faster than overall expenditures. This report presents information on direct expenditures for instruction, research, and public service at Illinois public universities during fiscal year 1992 and compares these findings to measures of…

Matched Illinois school districts, with and without teacher collective bargaining, were compared on expenditures in 13 budget categories to determine if collective bargaining is related to decreased nonteacher program expenditures. Results suggested that bargaining has led to significantly higher expenditures in both teacher salaries and other…

Education Resource Strategies (ERS) works with school and district leaders to help them more strategically use resources--people, time, and money--to improve student performance. They have found that many school districts begin creating small high schools without a clear sense of how much they will spend or how to ensure that small schools…

The purpose of this monograph is to explore the concept of educational adequacy, defined by Cubberley as "a generous system of free public schools," and to apply those measures in an analysis of educational adequacy in the state of Illinois. The difficulty in defining what constitutes a generous education is that there is no clear…

This report analyzes fiscal year 1992 expenditures for all but three of the administrative and support subfunctions included in the Illinois Resource Allocation and Management Program which collects expenditure data from Illinois public universities on 55 separate groupings of activities referred to as subfunctions or subprograms. Expenditures in…

This paper provides nine data tables, constituting nearly the entire report, that indicate current trends in Illinois' higher education expenditure patterns and revenue for its public universities and community colleges. Table 1 compares fiscal years 1990 and 1992 expenditures by sector and by sources of funds showing a 0.2 percent increase from…

This monograph evaluates the equity, adequacy, and efficiency of the Illinois system of school finance. After a brief introduction outlining the purpose and limitations of the study, it first develops two operational definitions of equity, based on disparity measurements and on the association between district spending and local wealth. The…

Ethnographic study of north-central Illinois agricultural county compares entrepreneurial and yeoman farm families and concludes that management strategies reflecting goals and values of these types of families affect susceptibility to financial crisis. Yeoman financial conservatism, family cooperation, modest farm goals, and behavior correlated…

In this paper, a companion piece to "Strategic Designs: Lessons from Leading Edge Small Urban High Schools" (ED544382), the authors analyze small high school spending in three urban districts--Baltimore City, Boston, and Chicago--to understand whether it is higher than in larger schools; if it is, why it is different; and the policy…