School Finance Toolkit: How to Create a Community Guide to Your School District's Budget

If your community-based organization would like to launch a school finance initiative in your community, you can use this toolkit as a starting point. The toolkit walks through the major steps organizations have gone through in their own initiatives, offering advice and examples of tools you can adapt for your own use. The toolkit explores the major challenges organizations have faced in this work, and how they have addressed those challenges. And the toolkit points you toward other resources that can help you find and analyze information about school finance. This toolkit is not itself a primer on school finance. Except in passing, it does not explain how school funding works in school districts. You will have to obtain this kind of background information from other resources (some listed in this toolkit) and as you go along.The toolkit contains five major sections:Get Started. This section helps you set a mission for your school finance initiative, organize your people to get the job done, and find the resources to get the job done.Engage the Public. This section discusses strategies for engaging the public up-front, finding out what citizens want to know about school finance -- and why.Crunch the Numbers. This section addresses the nitty-gritty work of creating a community guide to the school budget, offering helpful tips on finding, analyzing, and presenting information effectively.Put the Numbers to Work. This section talks about ways you can use the information you have gathered as a catalyst for community-wide discussions of school finance and its impact on school quality.Resources. This section contains a variety of tools used by community-based organizations in their school finance initiatives, everything from town meeting agendas to focus group questions to budget analysis spreadsheets. This section also contains references to many sources of data about school finance, many of them just a mouse-click or toll-free call away

What is a “Just” System for Financing Schools: An Evaluation of Alternative Reforms

Principles for public school finance are outlined with respect to an equitable allocation of educational resources by the state. The argument is advanced that equal dollars per pupil is a practical, reasonable, acceptable and attainable initial basis for school financing. Objections to the equal dollars scheme are considered, leading to an analysis which suggests that the appropriate policy choice for school finance reformers is enactment of full state financing of education

Pathways for School Finance in California

Simulates school finance reforms to equalize core program funding rates, shifting categorical programs to unrestricted support, raising funding for high-poverty districts, and adjusting regional rates. Focuses on special education and Economic Impact Aid

Funding Alternative Education Pathways: A Review of the Literature

This review drew upon anecdotal and empirical research and reports from a variety of fields, including education and school finance theory, alternative education pathways, nonprofit management, and charter school finance. This does not pretend to be a comprehensive thesis on either alternative education pathways or education financing, but rather a point of departure for future discussions. The review is loosely organized according to three aspects of resource allocation presented by Brent, Roellke, & Monk (1997), including fund origination, access and allocation, and utilization

Educating Arizona: Assessing Our Education System (Birth-Grade 12)

Assesses Arizona's educational challenges, including those presented by demographic and economic factors, and efforts to improve standards and accountability, teaching quality, leadership and governance, school choice, and public school finance

Effect of a School Finance Reform on Housing Stock and Residential Segregation: Evidence from Proposal A in Michigan

Local financing of public schools in the U.S. leads to a bundling of two distinct choices - residential choice and school choice - and increases the degree of socioeconomic segregation across school districts. A school finance reform can go a long way in weakening this link. In this paper I study the Michigan school finance reform of 1994 (Proposal A) which resulted in a comprehensive equalization of per pupil expenditures. Using panel data on Michigan K-12 districts and data from the decennial censuses I investigate whether the reform had any significant effects on spatial segregation. I find that Proposal A has been responsible for increases in housing stock and property values in the lowest spending school districts, and for improvements in several socioeconomic indicators, implying a decline is neighborhood sorting. However, there is continued high demand for residence in the highest spending communities, which points to the importance of neighborhood peer effects (‘local’ social capital).School finance reform, spatial segregation, Tiebout sorting, peer effects.

Comparing Arkansas Students to Their National Peers

In an attempt to gauge the educational progress of the nation and each state, Education Week has published state report cards since 1997 in its annual Quality Counts series. The 12th annual report, Tapping into Teaching: Unlocking the Key to Student Success, was released in early 2008 and merges the indicators from the shortened 2007 report, which focused on the “cradle-to-career” framework, with previous indicators such as efforts to improve teacher quality and school finance. To compare states across the nation, the Quality Counts series grades and ranks states based on six broad measures: efforts to improve the teacher quality; transitions and alignments; school finance; standards, assessments, and accountability; achievement in K-12 education; and chances for success

School Finance Systems and Their Responsiveness to Performance Pressures: A Case Study of North Carolina

Details the mechanisms of and influences on the state's school finance system, changes caused by increased performance pressures, local officials' views on alternative allocation of resources, and obstacles to linking resources to student learning