Five years after our 2019 analysis of student borrowing rates across the University of California (UC) system, TICAS partnered with the University of California Student Association (UCSA) again to evaluate the state of affordability and student debt for undergraduates at the UC, and their implications for student success. While our analysis finds…

Housing policy directly impacts schools. Public schools typically reflect their neighborhood demographics because most students are assigned to schools based on their residence. In 2021, over two thirds of K-12 public school students nationwide attended their neighborhood school. Thus, any serious hope of integrating America's public education…

The purpose of this quantitative, causal comparative study was to determine the extent to which capital outlay inequities bear a relationship to cost-saving measures in general (non-capital) education funding associated with budget reductions in operational funding during a time of fiscal distress. Further, the study ascertained the extent to…

The purpose of this dissertation is to analyze, from a Public Administration (PA) perspective, the provision of public education using the portfolio model, in which a school district employs autonomy-accountability tradeoffs to oversee a collection of schools operating under a variety of governance structures. The study relies on the New Public…

How can we better situate resource inequities between schools in the longer history of racial oppression and discrimination in the United States? This article provides both a historiographical panorama of the field on a range of topics related to school finance and a roadmap of archival and research paths. It seeks to sketch out the contours of a…

Recent evidence suggests school resources are continually segregated from minoritized communities. This funding disparity impacts students' long-term outcomes in school and in their community. Political discourse has prioritized school defunding, privatization through vouchers and related policies, and tax relief and at the same time greater…

English education has a long-standing parallel but unequal school system. State-maintained schools are free of charge for attendees; independent schools are free from state control and funded largely by fees. Most independent schools hold charitable status which benefits them in relation to taxation although they cater largely for socially…

Boards of trustees provide the policy, strategy, and accountability that set the direction for community colleges, all while being accountable to the states, regions, districts, and local areas they serve. One of those particular mission areas of community colleges is the preparation of the workforce to meet the needs of local economies and the…

An examination of school funding in cities in Michigan and Texas found wide disparities in the total amount of property taxes collected, but also differences in property tax rates. Families living in high-poverty neighborhoods whose children attended schools with relatively low funding actually paid higher property tax rates than wealthy families…

California state-level policies are responsible for allocating nearly 80 percent of the revenue received by its K-12 school districts. In 2013-14, the state implemented the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF), which changed the allocation formula from one based primarily on equal revenue per pupil to an equity-focused allocation based primarily…

Property tax limits have been found to reduce property tax revenue, with compensatory increases in replacement taxes often not sufficiently making up for funding loss and systematically promoting inequity. Consequently, such practices suggest severe implications for school district fiscal capacity. Our study explored this issue in South Carolina…

Using the W.E. Upjohn Institute's Promise Programs Database--a searchable data set covering about 200 place-based scholarship programs--this paper explores how the design of Promise programs can shape their equity impacts. The authors first examine the landscape of place-based programs to understand the impact of program design on equity outcomes.…

This study aimed to assess the effectiveness of existing insolvency predictive models employed for non-profit Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) and test a proposed predictive model utilizing statistical and ratio analysis by comparing HEIs in operations with those that closed from 2017 to 2020. The researcher incorporated a non-experimental,…

The DAPP (Difference & Dissonance, Assumptions, Power, and Patterns) Tool is intended to help educators, leaders, teams, schools, districts, education agencies, and other organizations to engage in the type of critical reflection necessary to build critical consciousness, and undertake more equitable and just actions, toward learning,…

School district leaders can have a vast influence on school improvement and student achievement. The purpose of this phenomenological study was to explore the experiences of school district leaders with budget allocation and decision-making responsibility for literacy and the factors that determined their budget allocation decisions. This study…