School districts across the United States are often forced into situations where limited public funds must be distributed among multiple districts. These are often reliant on distribution rates negotiated by district leadership and elected officials. An example of this is Georgia's 1% Education Local Option Sales Tax (ELOST). The tax is collected…

The topic of budgeting and financial resources often strikes fear in the hearts of community college administrators and faculty, as they believe it is an arcane and complex art understood only by accountants and financial specialists. This chapter attempts to demystify the basic concepts involved in budgeting and addresses approaches to budgeting,…

Over the next two decades, sub-Saharan Africa will face substantial pressure to expand its secondary education system. This is driven by the current low development of secondary education compared to other world regions, continued rapid population growth, the increase in the enrollment and completion rates at the primary education level, and the…

Some of the most promising reforms are happening where school leaders are thinking differently about how to get the strongest student outcomes from the limited resources available. But even principals who use their autonomy to aggressively reallocate resources say that persistent district, state, and federal barriers prohibit them from doing more.…

This article addresses two of the most repeated questions in APPA (1) How can we convert our reactive maintenance operations to a planned and predictable operation? and (2) In addition, how can we do this with little or no additional resources? It seems reasonable to assume that if a department is short on resources and in a full-blown reactive…

Urban community colleges face a myriad of convergent challenges, including the loss of state funding and local property tax support, increased demands for better performance and greater accountability, and record-high enrollment by the most underprepared students in higher education. Sometimes to make sense of it all, it helps to think of an onion.

This article is an attempt to build an empirical ground for supporting the increased role of public funding in higher education. The rationale for the same becomes pertinent in the current scenario when "public good" nature of higher education is rapidly eroding. Various measures like the proportion of GDP/GSDP spent and the trend of per…

How to finance higher education remains controversial among policy makers and constituencies across the United States. Texas is not exempt from the controversy. With increasingly strained state finances, institutions of higher education and the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) have come under pressure to increase performance…

Adolescence is characterized as a period of social reorientation toward peer relationships, entailing the emergence of sophisticated social abilities. Two studies (Study 1: N = 42, ages 13-17; Study 2: N = 81, ages 13-16) investigated age group differences in the impact of relationship reciprocation within school-based social networks on an…

The recent period can only be seen as one of rapid and substantial churn as UK governments have attempted to widen participation, strengthen the national system of innovation and control the direct public costs of higher education. Very similar issues have dominated the debate in Australia. This paper compares the current position of two higher…

Background/Context: While many studies show that greater economic inequality widens the achievement gap between rich and poor students, recent studies indicate that countries with greater economic inequality have lower overall student achievement. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: This study explores whether family inequalities…

Challenging the claims of pension boards and other groups about the cost-effectiveness, fairness and flexibility of the traditional defined benefit pension plans still in place in 38 states, this report includes a report card on each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia, with a detailed analysis of state teacher pension policies, and…

This report examines the Massachusetts child care subsidy system's balance between providing quality early childhood education and providing workforce support for parents. It is based on qualitative and quantitative data and findings from several studies conducted as part of a legislatively mandated assessment of the Massachusetts subsidized child…

In Sweden, as in many other European countries, poor neighborhoods with ethnically diverse inhabitants and high crime rates have grown up around big cities in the last decades. We hypothesized that, compared with adolescents in advantaged neighborhoods, adolescents in disadvantaged neighborhoods would perceive their schools as relatively safe, due…

This publication provides governmental and higher education decision-makers a statewide perspective of Arkansas public higher education finance for the 2019-21 biennium, as well as trends for the past several years. It also contains a detailed financial profile of each institution and presents a basis for comparative assessments of revenue sources…