Understanding how urban school districts allocate their education funds can help school leaders create more effective budgeting strategies and provide a basis for advocating for additional funding when necessary. This report provides an overview of how urban districts distribute their financial resources, highlights key areas of spending, and…

This paper asks whether increasing public school funding can be an effective long-run crime-prevention strategy in the U.S. Specifically, we examine the effect of increases in funding early in children's lives on the likelihood that they are arrested as adults. We exploit quasi-experimental variation in public school funding, leveraging two…

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…

The U.S. Department of Education has projected enrollment declines over the next decade, leading to budget cuts for school districts, which will be particularly impactful in urban and rural areas serving vulnerable students. As federal COVID-19 funds expire, districts will face challenges in cutting costs, potentially leading to layoffs or school…

As state school-based accountability systems have become more complex and increasingly comprehensive, school district leaders have struggled with the balance of managing limited school district funding while focusing on improving student academic achievement as quantified by state-mandated testing results. The amount of a school district's…

We leverage an obscure set of rules in Texas's school funding formula granting some districts additional revenue as a function of size and sparsity. We use variation from kinks and discontinuities in this formula to ask how districts spend additional discretionary funds, and whether these improve student outcomes. A $1,000 annual increase in…

Doing more with less is noble in public education. This is something quality public charter schools do well. It is also something, that cash-strapped rural and high need schools across Idaho know all too well themselves. It is well documented that all of public education in Idaho operates on leaner rations than do schools in most parts of the…

This report presents the results of a thorough study conducted by American Institutes for Research (AIR) to investigate the cost of providing an "adequate" education to California students attending public elementary, middle, and high schools. The study addresses the following question: "What is the cost of providing all California…

This document contains the following nine appendixes of the main report, "What Does It Cost to Educate California's Students? A Professional Judgment Approach. Technical Report. Getting Down to Facts II": (1) Professional Judgement Panel General Instructions; (2) Professional Judgement Panel. Task Instructions; (3) School Resource…

Imagine if a school were to spend more per pupil on ceramics electives than core science classes. What if a district were to push more funding to wealthy neighborhoods than to impoverished ones? Such policies would provoke outrage. Yet these schools and districts are real. Today's taxpayers spend almost $9,000 per pupil, roughly double what they…

The State Higher Education Finance (SHEF) report is produced annually by the State Higher Education Executive Officers (SHEEO) to broaden understanding of the context and consequences of multiple decisions made every year in each of these areas. No single report can provide definitive answers to such broad and fundamental questions of public…

In the postbellum southern U.S., African Americans were steadily disenfranchised, a modern publicly financed universal school system with racially segregated schools was created, and public school monies were allocated so that white pupils received substantially more than black pupils. An earlier paper (Ng and Halcoussis 2003) established a…

This article provides information on Maryland's state education finance and governance. The state provides a foundation funding program, which guarantees a minimum or foundation level of per-pupil expenditures for children in all the state's school systems; this is done through a combination of state aid and local revenue. In 2002, Maryland…

The 2007-08 operating budget for the North Dakota University System is over $960 million. Approximately 28 percent of operations are supported by the state general fund. The remainder of the operations of the University System are self-supporting through tuition and fees, room and board charges paid by students, and private and federal research…

The purpose of this paper is to examine the issues concerning school-by-school resource allocation processes today and their relation to concerns about equity, educational needs, and the development of more effective educational strategies for all pupils. A description of the special case of the District of Columbia follows a brief summary of…