As the enduring economic recession forces state and local governments to cut education budgets, astute allocation of resources is becoming more important. The author analyses three basic categories of educational resources: money, human capital, and time before moving to a discussion of resources as a component of school reform. The author…

Public higher education has relied on a variety of funding structures since the 1950s. Layzell (2007) describes five general approaches in contemporary use in the United States. "Incremental (baseline) budgeting" uses the current year budget as the base and then makes adjustments to account for expected changes in activities, revenues,…

The passage of the Kentucky Educational Reform Act (KERA) in 1990 had a dramatic impact on the funding of primary and secondary education in the state. The amount of money spent on education increased significantly with the passage of KERA with districts in rural areas of the state experiencing the largest growth in spending (Hoyt, 1999). This has…

Missouri implemented a new statewide funding formula based on the Outstanding Schools Act in 1993 to increase equity in school finance. This study examined the impacts of the new foundation funding formula on finance equity compared with the selected equity indices including range, restricted range, coefficient of variation, federal range ratio,…

As of March 2008, over half of U.S. states are facing projected budget shortfalls for the coming fiscal year. During economic downturns such as this, opportunities available to hard-working, low-wage families are diminished. These conditions create growing concerns for policymakers who must, with fewer state resources, enhance opportunities and…

This background paper examines the current state of higher education finance--the scope of the higher education enterprise, challenges to its funding base, and undesirable consequences of current financing practices--and describes what is meant by a "restructuring" of higher education finance. It demonstrates that the structures and practices…

This report addresses the issue of whether Ontario's investment in elementary education is adequate. Specific questions are posed, reviews of relevant literature conducted, and an assessment of the soundness and completeness of existing evidence is made. After an introductory overview, chapter 2 presents a series of five tables illustrating…

This document is part of the World Bank's comprehensive study of post-basic education and training in Sub-Sahara Africa and includes findings from three short field studies conducted in South Africa, Tanzania, and Zimbawe in early 2001. Chapter titles are as follows: Executive Summary; Introduction; Conventional Patterns of Financing Training;…