The partial financing of New York State's public schools with a state-mandated tax coupled with state aid based upon county or regional wealth rather than local district wealth would provide greater equalization of both revenues and expenditures of school districts than does the present law. A comparable increase in state aid appropriations under…

Florida's new school finance formula is characterized by a three mills power equalization scheme on top of a Strayer-Haig foundation plan. Finance legislation is predicated on the intent to equalize educational opportunity while increasing the authority and responsibility of districts for deciding matters of instructional organization and method.…

Published prior to the U.S. Supreme Court decision on the case, this report puts into perspective the questions and problems before the State of Texas in resolving the issue raised by Rodriguez vs San Antonio. The document reviews the key elements of the decision in the Rodriguez case and considers alternative approaches that comply with the…

Illinois' education finance plan is described in the first of this report's two chapters, and the second chapter considers the finance plan's equity. Chapter 1 covers the state's Resource Equalizer Aid Program and the tax revenue it guarantees districts; the calculation of maximum tax guarantees and local shares; the apportionment of state aid;…

The Potential Revenue Index (PRI) emphasizes the per cent of current school revenues that are derived from unequalized local taxation. Its purpose is to measure the extent to which potential school per pupil revenues are equalized by various State school support programs. One can also ask how much additional tax revenue people in low wealth school…

Three conference papers on school finance reform in Tennessee are presented in this document, with a focus on the disparities between rural and urban public school funding. The first paper examines the nature and size of contributions of various funding sources to the per-pupil revenue in local school districts, analyzes specific problems of the…

New Jersey's school funding reform initiative, the Quality Education Act of 1990 and its 1991 amendments, are described in this booklet. The amendments attempt to equalize the tax burden of all districts, provide property relief, and impose stricter spending limitations. In the new foundation funding system, the state provides aid based on a…

This report consists mainly of four separate issue papers, each prepared by an individual committee of the Minnesota School Task Force. Topics of the papers include educational management systems, Minnesota's state foundation aid program, school tax levy limitations, and educational overburden. In addition to the issue papers, the report also…

This report is one of a series on education finance undertaken to document existing disparities in expenditures for education, to analyze the sources of the disparities, and to describe and evaluate the gains and losses that would occur in differing types of school districts under alternative fiscal policies. This study shows that North Carolina's…

Following a summary of Canadian equity policies and of specific provisions made by Alberta, a statistical analysis of the impact of the existing funding mechanism leads to the conclusion that the alternative models of power equalizing and percentage equalizing would generally increase the level of equalization. (MJL)

THE STATE AID TO EDUCATION PROGRAMS IN KENTUCKY, MISSOURI, AND TENNESSEE ARE INVESTIGATED WITH RESPECT TO THEIR COMPENSATION FOR DIFFERENCES IN THE ABILITY OF LOCAL SCHOOL DISTRICTS TO SUPPORT EDUCATION. A HYPOTHETICAL AID FORMULA WAS USED AS A STANDARD AGAINST WHICH TO MEASURE THE PRESENT EQUALIZATION SCHEMA IN EACH OF THE THREE STATES. KENTUCKY…

An analysis of the relationship between district wealth and tax effort concludes that, while state aid is generally equalizing, the school funding structure is a dual system in which state aid is almost randomly spent in outlier districts. It is inferred that outliers translate guaranteed state aid into lower local taxes. (MJL)

This report outlines the educational fiscal impacts of the present Massachusetts system of school finance and describes the fiscal characteristics and effects of alternative finance plans that are both equitable and elastic in nature. The first part of the report describes and evaluates the overall character of the Massachusetts State-local fiscal…

This publication presents comprehensive, comparative expenditure data by local school system for the whole United States for the 1969-70 year and compares four decades of progress in school finance. The analysis in the document permits a view of State and national progress toward reducing or eliminating financial inequality and of the magnitude of…

This summary provides an overview of developments in school finance litigation since the United States Supreme Court's historic and lamentable 1973 ruling in "San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez" that wealth-based discrimination in educational expenditures does not violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to…