School funding formulas have been applied across a number of countries for at least the last 50 years. A national funding formula (NFF) was introduced in England in 2018 and aims to provide a platform for fair funding across the country. This study explores the variations in the NFF's high needs block (HNB) funding and examines links with the use…

Determining the level and distribution of special education funding is an ongoing issue. Attempting to meet the extensive range of students' needs, while balancing funding coming from federal, state, and local sources leads to uneven funding burdens and questions about whether all student needs are being met. Traditionally, funding for special…

Students with disabilities, English language learners, and economically disadvantaged students need additional resources and support to succeed in school. State school funding formulas should account for those additional needs so that every school can educate all its students. Weighted, student-based funding formulas are one of the most effective…

The federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) entitles students with disabilities to a free appropriate public education. Students with disabilities often require additional support to enable them to achieve academic and functional goals relative to their nondisabled peers. These legally protected supports and services all add up…

Education finance shapes what is possible in every school in the country. And finance equity is a critical step toward enabling other forms of educational equity for students who are underserved in under-resourced schools. But in too many states, the system of funding for schools remains inequitable, inadequate, and opaque to all but a few. Even…

Across all 50 states, there are different ways in which states allocate K-12 and special education funding to districts. Education Commission of the States has collected information on states' primary funding models, base per-student funding amounts, student attendance count methods, and funding for special education, English language learners,…

Most Americans today need some education beyond high school to secure a well-paying job, and higher education is a key factor in social and economic mobility. But higher education is not accessible to all students. To further equalize opportunity, states must understand options for improving the way they fund higher education. America's public…

For the 2014/15 school year, the state of North Rhine-Westphalia has changed its funding model for the provision of special needs teacher resources from an input-based to a throughput-based model. The rationale was that the previous input-funded system was assumed to be the cause for the increasing number of students diagnosed with special…

Access to high-quality early care and education (ECE) supports healthy child development, accelerates academic achievement, reduces educational inequality, and catalyzes economic growth. The benefits of ECE are even greater among economically disadvantaged children, children with disabilities, and multilingual learners. However, despite these…

California enacted a groundbreaking shift to its school-funding system when it passed the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) in 2013. The law sought to make funding more equitable and also aimed to increase local control based on the premise that budgeting decisions are best made at the local level in partnership with community stakeholders, who…

This article looks at some of the issues and possible responses for funding in special education, with a focus on the author's experiences as a special education teacher in Manitoba. Issues include making necessary changes to align funding with changes in policy, the problems associated with several different funding models, and the practicality…

Access to early learning before kindergarten has wide-ranging positive effects for children--effects that are evident from a child's early years into adulthood. Despite these facts being well-known within many education spaces, children from low-income families and children of color lack consistent access to public early learning programs. This…

The goal of state special education funding should be to equitably distribute funds that are adequate for all schools to meet their legal obligation to provide a free and appropriate public education to students with disabilities. Unfortunately, inadequate state special education funding is growing more common in Philadelphia schools. In this…

Purpose: New policy proposals to increase funding for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)--including recent efforts by the Biden-Harris administration to "fully fund" IDEA--bring a new sense of urgency to understanding how federal special education dollars are distributed among states. In this study, we evaluate…

We exploit differences in state special education funding systems based on special education enrollment ('bounty systems') or on total student enrollment ('census systems') to assess whether funding systems impact teacher turnover, teacher specialty, special education enrollment, state education spending, average class sizes, and teacher effort.…