The Department of Basic Education in South Africa acknowledges that 99% of primary school-aged children attend school, but attendance at secondary school level is not yet universal. Low levels of secondary school attendance contribute to poverty and unemployment. We investigated the socio-demographic elements associated with school attendance…

There was a fundamental reform of special educational needs policy in Scotland with the ratification of the 2004 Education (Additional Support for Learning) (ASL) (Scotland) Act. This paper explores official statistics from 2008-2023 by examining variations in additional support needs (ASN) and funding across the 32 Local Authorities (LAs). The…

The purpose of this paper is to examine the intersection of social class inequality and education policy through the lens of an analysis of the experiences and effects of state, local, and federal policy meant to engage communities around the use of federal funds to mitigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on students. The author intends to…

In this paper, we put forth a framework called Critical School Finance, articulating the framework itself and then applying it to school facilities finance. First, we go back to first principles and discuss what 'critical' denotes, revisiting critical theorist Max Horkheimer's seminal essay 'Traditional vs. Critical Theory.' Second, we offer five…

This study offers a comparative examination of desegregation policy reforms in Belgium, Chile, and the Netherlands, addressing equity reforms to universal school choice systems. Through an analysis of the reform trajectories, we explore the evolution of policies, the causal mechanisms of change, efforts to institutionalize policies, and the…

This article is an exploratory analysis of nearly 40 years of trends in education funding to explore the current state of funding for Indian elementary and secondary (K-12) education and whether it is sufficient. A description of the current funding system for K-12 Indian education, four programs undergirding the analysis, and relevant literature…

Racially segregated schools influence the distribution of educational opportunity. When students of different races enroll in separate schools, systematic differences in access to school resources and exposure to high levels of student need can emerge. Using recently available national school-level finance data, we find that typical Black and…

Many countries have implemented policies to prevent or combat educational disadvantage associated with socioeconomic factors in the students' home environment. Under such policies, educational institutions generally receive extra support from the central or local government. The support is normally based on indicators available in the home…

This article reflects on evidence drawn from an evaluation of the impact of a scholarship programme for students from disadvantaged backgrounds at Macquarie University, Sydney. In addition to evidence of improved retention rates, the article suggests that qualitative data derived from a number of interviews with scholarship recipients highlight…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the connections between state education finance distribution models and student achievement. To date, lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of state finance systems have been heard in 45 states; the judicial interpretation of the requirement to provide equality of educational opportunity has…

Our study adds to prior work on Indiana's Twenty-first Century Scholars(TFCS) program by focusing on whether participating in--rather than completing--the program affects the likelihood of students going to college and where they initially enrolled. We first employ binary and multinomial logistic regression to obtain estimates of the impact of the…

Two years after the U.S. Department of Education awarded $650 million in Investing in Innovation grants, some of the winners are still facing financial uncertainty. Other grantees have also encountered problems with matching funds coming through, and some nonprofit grantees have been forced to contribute their own money to match the initial…

A Maintenance of Effort (MOE) provision for higher education was first adopted in the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008 and was included as a requirement for states to participate in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA). The information in this article was presented before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on…

Michigan radically altered its school finance system in 1994. The new plan, called Proposal A, significantly increased state aid to the lowest-spending school districts and limited future increases in spending in the highest-spending ones, abolishing local discretion over school spending. I investigate the impact of Proposal A on the distribution…

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said that he plans to demand radical steps--such as firing most of a school's staff or converting it to a charter school--as the price of admission in directing $3.5 billion in new school improvement aid to the nation's 5,000 worst-performing schools. In sharp contrast to the current free-flowing nature of…