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…

This is the first of two reports exploring the relationship between coal activity and funding for elementary and secondary education in the Appalachian Region. In this first report, patterns in funding for elementary and secondary education are explored using annual data from 1995 to 2016. Counties that had some level of coal employment over this…

California policymakers have established the expectation that all public school students should have access to a broad course of study, in classes where instruction is consistent with the state's content standards. Further, the state holds schools and school districts accountable for their ability to ensure that all students achieve at a specified…

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…

This research briefly summarizes a series of Ohio Supreme Court litigation known as "DeRolph v. State" and then measures the equality of expenditures among Ohio school districts. "DeRolph v. State" was a high-profile school finance adequacy case. Nevertheless, the high court continuously expressed concern for the financial…

The purpose of this research was to investigate the role of school district expenditures in predicting student achievement in Ohio for the school year 2009-2010. Building upon the concept of the "65 percent solution," the research questions that guided this study were: (1) What percentage of Ohio's school district's operating budgets…

In the era of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, school districts are under increasing pressure from policymakers to hold all students to high performance standards. In response, a growing number of schools are embracing the principles of student-centered learning (SCL). SCL is a contemporary approach that combines progressive and…

Over the last three decades 45 states have been confronted with school finance lawsuits. This phenomenon has led to a proliferation of school funding equity studies. However, to date, most studies of the equity of state school finance systems have focused on differences in expenditures between school districts. More recent research has found…

The purpose of this research is to investigate factors that contribute to fiscal problems for public school districts in order to develop a model using benchmarks for maintaining fiscal health. School district revenues and expenditures are analyzed in order to identify patterns that can be used to predict financial stress. Of the 606 school…

This document outlines a framework for a child-centered education approach to meet the requirements of the school-funding reforms mandated by the Ohio Supreme Court. The restructuring, which tied funding to education opportunity, was in response to the court case, "DeRolph vs. State," which ended reliance on the local property tax as the…

The School Site Allocations Model, tested in five Ohio districts, consists of the following subsystems: administration, facilities and operations, staff support and development, pupil support, and instruction. Applying these functions at the central office and at the school site can help districts determine how well they are managing their…

Regression analysis on cost and expenditure data from 616 Ohio school districts indicates that districts in high wage areas respond to higher resource costs by reducing salaries and student-teacher ratios and by raising tax rates. State and federal aid does not fully offset the higher resource costs. (Author/RW)

From analysis of data from 579 school districts it is concluded that financial ratios have the ability to forecast fiscal distress a year in advance. Liquidity ratios and salary and fringe benefit ratios were found to be strong forecasters, while per pupil expenditure data had little predictive value. (MJL)

This report sets up a structure for examining the real costs of public education. It defines three approaches of gathering and reporting cost information: narrow (salaries and current expenditures, excluding capital outlays); generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) (costs are recorded during the period in which they occur); and broad (all…

In 1995, a federal report by the General Accounting Office (GAO) estimated that $112 billion was needed to bring the nation's school facilities into good repair. Subsequent studies estimated it would take more than $320 billion to build new schools to handle swelling enrollments, renovate aging buildings, and equip all buildings with the…