Education managers are typically inexperienced in and often reluctant to initiate cost-savings actions. Budget cuts may be poorly targeted, and students, particularly economically disadvantaged students, are swept up in the process as collateral damage. In California and Washington, bad budget cutting has already begun. Governors in these two…

Tough economic times mean tight school district budgets, possibly for years to come. Education is a labor-intensive industry, and because most districts devote well over half of all spending to teacher compensation, budget cuts have already led to the most substantial teacher layoffs in recent memory. Although the 2010 federal Education Jobs and…

If one relies on newspaper headlines for education funding information, one might conclude that America's schools suffer from a perpetual fiscal crisis, every year perched precariously on the brink of financial ruin, never knowing whether there will be sufficient funding to continue operating. Budgetary shortfalls, school district bankruptcies,…

When the Cleveland, Ohio, school board had to make radical cuts in its budget last spring, it was forced to eliminate 540 teaching jobs. There wasn't a whole lot of mystery about "which" teachers among Cleveland's 3,500-member teaching force would be the ones to lose their jobs. The state's hard-and-fast seniority rule--last hired, first…