State funding for public higher education institutions is crucial in supporting college access and completion, particularly among students from historically under-represented groups, yet little is known about the mechanisms that states use to allocate funds and how they are affected by financial challenges. This article provides the first detailed…

Over the past 50 years, student activists and community organizers on college campuses have advocated for divestment as a strategy to enact necessary change. These activists and organizers are often tasked to confront the higher education elite, such as trustees, with these demands. Higher education institutions will only continue to face immense…

Recent evidence suggests school resources are continually segregated from minoritized communities. This funding disparity impacts students' long-term outcomes in school and in their community. Political discourse has prioritized school defunding, privatization through vouchers and related policies, and tax relief and at the same time greater…

Budgets are moral documents, reflecting our priorities as a nation by deciding where to allocate resources. Congress is targeting cuts and policy changes that limit access to health care, nutrition programs, and basic financial stability for millions of children, including Medicaid, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), and the…

Deciding how to spend the nation's education dollars is a tremendous responsibility. It's easy to forget that this responsibility falls primarily to district leaders (sometimes with input from principals). Sometimes those decisions go well and schools beat the odds on student outcomes. Other times, they do not, and student outcomes lag. Sometimes…

The coronavirus pandemic has emptied campuses and left many students facing an uncertain educational future. Particularly vulnerable are Black and Latinx students, who are significantly more likely than whites to report that they have canceled or changed their education plans during the pandemic. The $2.2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief &…

This article examines how three relatively recent decisions enacted and upheld by Pennsylvania lawmakers have increased racial disparities in education funding and are helping to explode what Ladson-Billings has termed the educational debt. We find that districts with the highest concentrations of Black and Latinx students are profoundly…

The United States and Pennsylvania economies remain deeply depressed compared to before the COVID-19 pandemic. While the unemployment rate has come back down to around 7% (7.3% in Pennsylvania, 6.9% in the U.S.), Pennsylvania had 488,000 fewer jobs in October than February and the U.S., 10 million fewer. With COVID case rates higher than ever and…

This brief looks at how Pennsylvania distributed $174 million to Pennsylvania's public school districts in K-12 funding from the CARES Act that the federal government left up to states to allocate. The legislature and the Wolf administration agreed to distribute a fixed amount per district plus distribution of the remaining funds based on…

Because of the pandemic, many states will likely need to determine how they can best address shrinking revenues with the least harm to students, even as the needs of students have increased and the crisis has exposed gaping disparities. ExcelinEd, in partnership with a diverse group of organizations--the Aspen Institute, the District Management…

Emotional intelligence is a crucial and key ingredient of great leadership and can be seen as a transformational part of leadership that can bring unparalleled leader, member, and organizational success. While a plethora of research and data exists on emotional intelligence, deficiencies in evidence exist to understand the relevance in school…

State support for public higher education has been a primary concern for decades. Online education has been identified previously as an alternative revenue source that can offer financial relief to colleges and universities. This study uses IPEDS data and a fixed effects regression approach to examine whether public universities increase their…

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Michigan families and educators are worried about their students' unfinished learning, while state- and district-level leaders face unprecedented decisions to safely prepare for the fall and address the potentially devastating impact of the public health and economic crises on education. Tragically, Michigan…

Although there has been significant progress in the long term, achievement gaps among the nation's students persist.Many factors have contributed to the disparities in outcomes, and societal changes can explain progress, or lack thereof, over the past few decades.This is well documented in the 2010 Educational Testing Service (ETS) report…

Chapter 1: In response to tightened budgets and concerns about higher education costs, governments have introduced rules to limit the use of publicly funded aid, particularly at for-profit colleges. In this paper, we use an event study framework to estimate how tuition, enrollments, and loan use changed at for-profit colleges that became…