What can the federal government do to help ensure that the public schools attended by children living in poverty have enough resources to serve their students? In this brief, we describe existing federal efforts to support education spending in high-poverty districts, discuss their limitations, and suggest alternative approaches for federal…

Sixty-seven school finance reforms (SFRs), a combination of court-ordered and legislative reforms, have taken place since 1990; however, there is little empirical evidence on the heterogeneity of SFR effects. In this study, we estimate the effects of SFRs on revenues and expenditures between 1990 and 2014 for twenty-six states. We find that, on…

In this policy brief, we use the case of California's Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) to provide policy makers and educators guidance on how to involve the public in goal setting and resource distribution decisions. We provide clarity around who is and is not participating, why, and what broader lessons we can draw for implementing federal…

A major feature of the school finance landscape over the last two decades has been the reform of state school finance systems. Using the case of Maryland's Bridge to Excellence in Public Schools Act, this paper extends the current literature by developing a conceptual framework for residential bidding and sorting and using it to estimate housing…

Several states and the federal government distribute aid for special education programs based primarily on total district enrollment and a fixed aid amount per student, a method called "census funding." In this policy brief, we address three questions to help policy makers, educators, and researchers better understand census-funding…

This article explores whether two popular policy initiatives are compatible or conflicting strategies for enhancing educational equality in diverse large urban centers. These two initiatives are (1) charter school expansion and (2) improvement of resource equity across urban public school systems through policies often referred to as weighted…

We propose an efficiency-based mechanism for state funding of public colleges and universities using data envelopment analysis. We describe the philosophy and the mathematics that underlie the approach and apply\break the proposed model to data from 362 U.S. public four-year colleges and universities. The model provides incentives to institution…

This article discusses issues of justice concerning school finance with a focus on the development of a conception of equality of educational opportunity. Emphasis is put on discussing the views of the other contributors in this symposium. The main conclusions of the discussion are that (1) equity and adequacy are not inconsistent views because…

In recent years, state legislatures, state education departments, and advocacy groups in more than thirty states have sponsored education adequacy studies, which aim to determine objectively the amount of funding needed to provide all students with a meaningful opportunity for an adequate education. Based on a detailed analysis of judicial and…

In 1997, Vermont passed Act 60, which reformed its education finance system to achieve greater equality of spending. The reform encouraged wealthy towns to reduce spending; it was politically unpopular and was replaced, in 2004, by Act 68. We analyze the spending incentives created by the two acts and estimate the effects the change will have on…

A Comparable Wage Index (CWI) is an attractive mechanism for measuring geographic variations in the cost of education. A CWI measures uncontrollable variations in educator pay by observing systematic variations in the earnings of comparable workers who are not educators. Together, the 2000 census and the Occupational Employment Statistics survey…