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…

As widely reported and documented, the coronavirus pandemic hit schools hard. To address challenges caused by COVID-19, the U.S. Congress created and funded the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund (ESSER). While educators and the field have learned much during the era of reforming high poverty schools, the challenge to improve…

This paper compares and critiques two budgeting models used at public universities: Central Administrative Management (CAM), and Resource Centered Management (RCM). These approaches represent alternative resource allocation methods: under CAM budgets are assigned centrally based primarily on allocation history, while RCM relies on decentralized…

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…

This study involved an intradistrict equity audit of one mid-Atlantic school district using a Critical Resource Theory lens (Owings, Kaplan, & Whitfield, 2022). This study utilized publicly available school-level expenditure data to determine the allocation and distribution of resources to expose any existing disparities. We used Skrla,…

Educational institutions operate within multiple hierarchical levels with each level typically influencing policies or outcomes at other levels within the hierarchy. For example, decisions made at the state level may influence decisions at the local education agency (LEA) level which may influence decisions at the school building level (as well in…

If money matters, then school systems need to allocate it equitably among districts, schools, and individual students. Whether money is allocated equitably among students within the same school remains largely unknown. To date, a number of studies have analyzed the allocation of educational funding at either the district or the school level, but…

The Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act passed by Congress in 2020 included significant aid to state education systems. These included direct aid to K-12 districts and higher education institutions, and funds to be used at the discretion of Governors through the Governor's Emergency Education Relief Fund (GEER). We examine…

The relationship between educational expenditures and student achievement is a debate that has taken place over the course of nearly four decades. Accordingly, some researchers have labeled this question the "holy grail" of school finance (Stiefel, Schwartz, Rubenstein, & Zable, 2005). Most scholars trace this debate to the…

The key to anticipating local response to state finance policy is to bridge knowledge of the state context with the specifications of the individual reform. Yet it is precisely this unique blend of social, political, and economic factors in any given state that makes the impact of school finance reforms difficult to predict, especially as these…

North Carolina special education funding utilizes a dollar allotment per identified student, applying a funding cap based on a percentage of district average daily membership. While representing an attempt to reduce over-identification of students with special needs the funding cap has led to large systematic disparities in district fiscal…

As K-12 (kindergarten through twelfth grade) local education agencies (LEAs) face continued fiscal pressure, noninstructional service consolidation advocates point to states like Florida, with its countywide school systems, as an example of LEAs exploiting scale economies to reduce per-pupil spending, especially in administration and other…

Presenters at the State of the States Roundtable session at the 2014 National Education Finance Conference in Louisville were invited to submit their papers for publication. These papers address the following topics: (1) State issues affecting P-12 and/or higher education funding; (2) Funding priorities/trends for P-12 and/or higher education; (3)…

In 2016, a group of school finance scholars and public school practitioners gathered in Jacksonville, Florida, for the National Education Finance Academy's annual conference to discuss, among an array of topics, the state of P-20 finance in all 50 states. At the roundtable discussion, 36 states were represented, and scholars representing 30 states…

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationships between the distribution of educational funds allocated by the central government and the educational achievement distribution (EAD) at the primary school level. To this end, the extent of equity in education funding, and the extent of the equality of educational opportunity (EEO) in the…