Most Americans today need some education beyond high school to secure a well-paying job, and higher education is a key factor in social and economic mobility. But higher education is not accessible to all students. To further equalize opportunity, states must understand options for improving the way they fund higher education. America's public…

This paper is a first effort to systematically document programmatic interventions in five of the ten communities participating in The Jewish Teen Education & Engagement Funder Collaborative, a joint philanthropic effort launched in 2013. The paper identifies patterns and trends reflected in the programmatic choices made by each community. It…

This brief summarizes findings from a three-year, U.S. Department of Education-funded research study analyzing the use of weighted student funding (WSF) at the district and state level. The study focuses on these key questions: (1) Why do districts adopt WSF? (2) Is there a typical WSF model that districts are using? (3) Do WSF districts spend…

The United States and Pennsylvania economies remain deeply depressed compared to before the COVID-19 pandemic. While the unemployment rate has come back down to around 7% (7.3% in Pennsylvania, 6.9% in the U.S.), Pennsylvania had 488,000 fewer jobs in October than February and the U.S., 10 million fewer. With COVID case rates higher than ever and…

This brief looks at how Pennsylvania distributed $174 million to Pennsylvania's public school districts in K-12 funding from the CARES Act that the federal government left up to states to allocate. The legislature and the Wolf administration agreed to distribute a fixed amount per district plus distribution of the remaining funds based on…

The research examines whether and how performance-based funding formulas adopted by state policymakers for their public colleges and universities influence administrative behavior, both across and within institutions in states where the formulas are in place. The research builds from the public management literature and argues that despite the…

I conduct a series of analyses aimed at assessing equity in selective American colleges over a 20+ year time frame. My main measures of equity are enrollment and completion in selective colleges, which I disaggregate by race/ethnicity. After creating an institutional-level panel data set with variables on college revenues and expenses, tuition,…

Access to high-quality early care and education (ECE) supports healthy child development, accelerates academic achievement, reduces educational inequality, and catalyzes economic growth. The benefits of ECE are even greater among economically disadvantaged children, children with disabilities, and multilingual learners. However, despite these…

For the 2014/15 school year, the state of North Rhine-Westphalia has changed its funding model for the provision of special needs teacher resources from an input-based to a throughput-based model. The rationale was that the previous input-funded system was assumed to be the cause for the increasing number of students diagnosed with special…

Charter schools are public schools of choice, according to the Nation's Report Card (NAEP). The U.S. Department of Education uses the term "public charter school." A public charter school is a publicly funded school that is typically governed by a group or organization under a legislative contract--a charter-- with the state, district,…

The impact of the pandemic has once again pushed higher education institutions to the limit, forcing many private not-for-profit institutions to rethink their budgeting plans. As students consider alternative options to college, become more selective in their academic study, and seek greater resources, institutions will have to make difficult…

This study examines the impact of court-ordered finance reform in New York State resulting from "Campaign for Fiscal Equity v. State of New York" on equity of inputs using synthetic controls. The findings herein indicate court mandated education finance reform in New York had little to no impact on equity of educational inputs despite an…

Policy responses to disparities in education have proven to be largely inadequate in reducing persistent differences in academic outcomes, commonly referred to as the achievement gap. In this article, we identify some of the ways in which the fragmented nature of public policy generally, and education policy specifically, has contributed to the…

This study examined evidence of equity for English Learners-one of the three targeted student groups--in the early implementation of California's Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) across data sets from seven studies. We used social justice inquiry methods and data integration analytic approaches that included purposeful sampling of districts'…

More than 5 years after the passage of the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF), California school districts continue to develop and refine strategies to act on the opportunities and expectations associated with the state's school finance system. A new project called the LCFF Test Kitchen has enabled three school districts to make progress by…