School districts in the United States often borrow on the municipal bond market to pay for capital projects. Districts serving economically disadvantaged communities tend to receive lower credit ratings and pay higher interest rates. To remedy this problem, 24 states have established credit enhancement programs that promise to repay district debt…

School finance court cases have proceeded one or more times in all but two states. Plaintiffs ask the courts to rule that the existing funding formula is unconstitutional under state constitutions, and the defendants call for continuation of the existing finance formula. By compiling and analyzing the universe of such cases, we can accurately…

The 2024-2025 AASA Superintendent Salary & Benefits Study marks the thirteenth consecutive edition of this report. The national survey tracked the demographics, salary, benefits, and other elements of the employment agreements of school superintendents throughout the country. This year's study results are based on 2,077 complete responses. The…

The purpose of this study was to examine whether district funding influences the leadership work of school principals. This study explored the role of the elementary principal in four school districts. Two districts were located in communities with an affluent population and the schools had an abundance of fiscal resources; the other two districts…

This comparative case study was conducted to explore how family contributions are garnered and allocated at two socioeconomically different schools in Kansas and how those contributions mitigate or exacerbate existing inequities between schools. The Parent Teacher Association at each school was a focus of the study as it is the main avenue for…

"Making the Grade analyzes the condition of public school funding in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The current report presents a picture of school funding in 2020-2021, the first full school year of the COVID-19 pandemic and the most recent data available. The report ranks and grades each state on three measures to answer the…

This quantitative study investigated the impact of leadership behaviors and additional factors on teacher morale across seven schools from three Arkansas school districts. The study utilized the "Leadership Practices Inventory (LPI)" and "Purdue Teacher Opinionaire (PTO)" as measurement tools to explore various leadership…

This study examined the correlation between student achievement, the financial health of a diverse sample of public Illinois elementary school districts, and their local wealth. Research suggested that the wealth of the district within itself does not affect student performance. Specific possible associated factors included instructional methods,…

The impact of school resources on student outcomes was first raised in the 1960s and has been controversial since then. This issue enters into the decision making on school finance in both legislatures and the courts. The historical research found little consistent or systematic relationship of spending and achievement, but this research…

The American School District Panel (ASDP) is the newest addition to the RAND Corporation's American Educator Panels (AEP), which are designed to survey panels of educators several times each year. RAND recruits AEP members using probabilistic sampling methods, which allow researchers to weight survey results to generalize to the national…

By case-studying a multi-route school-choice system like that of Hong Kong, this study attempts to investigate the role of district characteristics in student access to school choice under different admissions policies. A district's income, education, and immigrant level all had stronger negative impacts on school-choice assignments made by the…

Although the relationships between family income and student identification for gifted programming are well documented, less is known about how school and district wealth are related to student identification. To examine the effects of institutional and individual poverty on student identification, we conducted a series of three-level regression…

Although the relationships between family income and student identification for gifted programming are well documented, less is known about how school and district wealth are related to student identification. To examine the effects of institutional and individual poverty on student identification, we conducted a series of three-level regression…

The onset of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has prompted school districts in the United States to offer remote schooling options for their K-12 students. The authors of this report fielded the third American School District Panel (ASDP) survey in June 2021 to assess districts' plans to offer both temporary and more-lasting remote…

A wide research base has documented the unequal access to and enrollment in K-12 gifted and talented services and other forms of advanced learning opportunities. This study extends that knowledge base by integrating multiple population-level datasets to better understand correlates of access to and enrollment in gifted and talented services,…