To foster high quality education, some states are treating districts differently, reserving a heavy hand for some and granting more flexibility and regulatory freedom to others. South Carolina was the first state to enact a flexibility program granting blanket waivers, or wide-scale exemptions from whole categories of education regulations, to a…

From all existing evidence, there is no inevitability about the relationship between centralized fiscal responsibility and decentralized decisionmaking. He who pays the piper does not necessarily call the tune. (Author)

Today local control over education seems to face the most serious challenge in its history. The movement to reform school finance raises the specter of the State assuming its formal consitutional powers and removing autonomy from the communities. Hence, it is argued, as the State takes over control of taxation and expenditures it will want to…

In the late 1980s and 1990s, states began working to decrease the level of regulation of public education, using a variety of approaches to regulatory flexibility. This paper examines the evolution of deregulation, from limited waiver programs to charter-school plans and new performance-based accountability systems that include broad-scale…