Targeted school funding is a potentially valuable policy lever to increase educational equality by race, ethnicity, and income, but it remains unclear how to target funds most effectively. We use a regression discontinuity approach to compare districts that narrowly passed or failed a school funding election. We use close tax elections in 9 states…

After recent experimental evidence suggesting that private school students using the Louisiana Scholarship Program (LSP) performed worse than their public school peers in math, some legislators discussed cutting the program as a way to reduce state education expenditures in Louisiana, spinning it as a way to save taxpayer money. While cutting the…

We use close tax elections to estimate the impact of school district funding increases on operational spending and student outcomes across seven states. Districts with passing levies directed new revenue toward support services and instructor salaries but did not increase teacher staffing levels. These districts eventually realized gains in…

This paper explores what happens to similar groups of children educated in different school districts. In this case, the "twins" in the study are groups of students who live in the same state in similar geographies and who share certain demographic characteristics. For this report, "twin districts" have very similar sizes and…

As federal aid for students uprooted by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita begins making its way to cash-strapped school districts, many educators are worried that the money Congress allocated will fall well short of their costs. Since the hurricanes damaged hundreds of schools in the Gulf Coast region and initially dispersed nearly 375,000 students,…

The desegregation of Southern schools following the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown decision was perhaps the most important innovation in U.S. education policy in the 20th century. This paper assesses the effects of desegregation on its intended beneficiaries, black students. In Louisiana, substantial reductions in segregation between 1965 and 1970…

This report provides an overview of education in Louisiana. The study on which the report is based on detailed examinations of financial and statistical data in nine individual school districts, covering the years 1996 to 1999. The study found that some key financial data were inaccurate and, in some cases, not even available. It examined the cost…

This report, which focuses on education in Louisiana, gives the results of research on various education issues in Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) states and provides information on how southern states collect and use different education-related data. The article discusses education costs and revenues, as well as how financial, student,…

"The 2009 Legislative Briefing" is a topical summary of actions during the 2009 legislative sessions that affect education in the 16 SREB states. Topics include: state budgets and the economy; tax and revenue; teacher and faculty pay raises; retirement systems; issues affecting teachers and education leaders; health and safety;…

The purpose of this study was to gather data and test the hypothesis that the number of constant dollars expended for educational supervision by Louisiana public school systems increased during the decade from 1963 to 1974. To facilitate comparison of expenditures from different years, all financial data are expressed in terms of "constant…

Changes in financial support patterns in four southern states over the course of major school desegregation were examined for the period from the late 1960s through the mid 1970s. The states included in the study were Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina, those States with the largest proportion of black children in the country. The…

This report studies the feasibility of several alternative quadrimester programs for year-round schools and attempts to determine if adoption of such a schedule would be beneficial for the Lafayette Parish school system. In addition to a discussion of the probable educational impact of various quadrimester programs, the author presents an analysis…

This policy brief presents findings from Southwest Educational Development Laboratory research on resource allocation in 1,504 independent school districts in Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, and Texas. Using 5 years' data from the federal Common Core of Data and the Census Bureau along with 3 years of student performance data from each state…