Connecticut's public K-12 education system relies heavily on local funding, resulting in substantial disparities between affluent districts and low-income districts with a large proportion of socioeconomically disadvantaged students who are more costly to educate. Despite recent improvements, the existing state aid formula has been criticized for…

School finance reforms are not well defined and are likely more prevalent than the current literature has documented. Using a Bayesian changepoint estimator, we quantitatively identify the years when state education revenues abruptly increased for each state between 1960 and 2008 and then document the state-specific events that gave rise to these…

Education funding in the United States relies primarily on state and local resources, with just a tiny share of total revenues allotted by the federal government. Most analyses of the primary school finance metrics--equity, adequacy, effort, and sufficiency--raise serious questions about whether the existing system is living up to the ideal of…

What is the impact of regulatory reforms that enhance credit market efficiency on children's human capital? Using a parent-child panel dataset, we find that such reforms reduced children's academic performance in low-income families. Consistent with the view that financial development entices low-income parents to substitute out of childrearing…

"Power, Constraint, and Policy Change" analyzes state court influence on state education finance reform. Beginning in the early 1970s litigants began filing suits in state courts to change state education funding in order to prevent disparities in education resources between wealthy and poor communities. These cases represent a…

According to a 2019 Pew Research Center survey, 67% of Americans support raising the federal minimum hourly wage from $7.25 to $15 per hour, with 41% strongly supporting the increase. Raising the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour has been the battle cry for many members of Congress, while others have opposed or expressed concern regarding, such…

When it comes to social mobility, the goalposts are always moving. As access to any given level of education becomes more common, inequalities tend to move upwards, with those from better-off backgrounds seeking to keep their advantages. While access to undergraduate degrees has been improving, with more and more young people going onto…

Student funding remains hotly contested. In this HEPI Debate Paper, Alan Roff examines the findings of the Office for Budget Responsibility, which regards the past treatment of student loans in the national accounts as a 'fiscal illusion'. Roff explores the consequences of this change of heart and pushes for an alternative approach to student…

Defined benefit (DB) pension systems determine the size of pension payments using an employee's "final average salary". Thus, employees enrolled in DB pension systems face an incentive to "salary spike" -- strategically increase late career pensionable compensation -- to increase their retirement income. This is an important…

Michigan's public higher education institutions have seen decades of decline in per-student funding, leaving students to face costs that are simply out of reach. The state, for the most part, relies on institutions to provide aid to bring down costs for students at four-year institutions, rather than providing students with aid directly via state…

After five decades advocating for school finance reform, Education Law Center (ELC) sees the urgent need to deepen understanding of how differing strategies--from litigation to research to grassroots organizing to communicating with the public--can combine to achieve successful school funding reform in the states. In "From Courthouse to…

Given that private schools are institutionally divided into the binary structure of for profit and nonprofit, the existing tax laws and policies aimed at private education feature obvious flaws. Reforms to the taxation system for private education should bring it in line with the state's binary structure for the division of private schools,…

This paper offers new evidence on the impacts of school finance reforms (SFRs) precipitated by school finance litigation, exploring the extent to which the impact of SFR differs by district racial composition. Using difference-in-differences and event study models with a series of district and year (or state-by-year) fixed effects, and a…

This purpose of this essay is to start a conversation about expanding the focus in education finance to more comprehensively include the problems of educational inheritance and generational tradeoffs as central to education for generational succession. It is based on both long-term personal experience both as a professor, and as school board…

This article explores the passage and failure of the 1973 Illinois Resource Equalizer formula which was designed to reduce disparities in school finance by breaking the connection between local wealth and school revenue. It argues that two sets of goals drove passage of the new law--equity and local property tax relief--and they came into conflict…