Financing Higher Standards in Public Education: The Importance of Accounting for Educational Costs

Performance standards have been at the center of recent debates on educational reform. Many states have implemented new performance standards, often based on student test scores, and a district's state aid is sometimes linked to its success in meeting the standards. This focus on performance is designed primarily to promote better student achievement by holding schools accountable. However, a school's performance is influence not only by the actions of its administrators and teachers but also by factors outside its control, such as the nature of its student body. Thus, a focus on performance is inevitably unfair, especially to cities, unless it accounts for the impact on performance of factors outside the control of school officials. To be fair, school report cards and performance-based state aid systems must distinguish between poor performance based on external factors and on school inefficiency. Many state aid systems have taken one step in this direction by compensating districts with low wealth, a factor over which they have no control. However, school district performance is also influenced by the cost of education, which varies widely from district to district based on local wage rates, student characteristics, and other external factors. Existing state aid formulas either ignore these factors altogether or else use ad hoc corrections, such as "weighted pupil" counts, that account for them partially at best. In this policy brief, we explain why a performance focus and educational cost indexes must go hand in hand, discuss alternative methods for estimating educational cost indexes, and show how these cost indexes can be incorporated into a performance-based state aid program. We show, using data from New York State, that controlling for costs in the design of school aid formulas is crucial to enable central cities to reach educational adequacy standards.

An Examination of the Financial Health of Georgia's Start-Up Charter Schools - Brief

This report examines the financial health of start-up charter schools in Georgia during the 2006-07 school year. FRC Brief 19

Education Finance Reform in New York: Calculating the Cost of a 'Sound Basic Education' in New York City

In June 2003 the New York State Court of Appeals altered the education-finance landscape with its ruling in Campaign for Fiscal Equity v. New York. This ruling called for “[r]eforms to the current system of financing school funding” designed to ensure “that every school in New York City would have the resources necessary for providing the opportunity for a sound basic education.” This ruling addressed a wide range of issues, but also declared that “the funding level necessary to provide City students with the opportunity for a sound basic education is an ascertainable starting point.” This policy brief addresses the question: How can this funding level be determined? Any calculation of the cost of a “sound basic education” must begin with a definition of this term, that is, with a decision about the educational standard every district is supposed to reach. This is a decision to be made by lawmakers, with input from the Court of Appeals. We begin with an overview of the issues that arise in making this decision, and then turn to the main concern of this policy brief, namely, how to calculate the cost of a sound basic education once it has been defined by lawmakers.

Measured dose distributions of iodine-125 sources and the computerised optimisation of their positions in brachytherapy planning

Includes bibliographies.The use of 1-125 seeds in brachytherapy is widespread and becoming increasingly varied. The spatial dose distributions around two types of 1-125 seeds in general use, were measured using a Geiger-Muller chamber. Seeds with the 1-125 adsorbed onto resin spheres had a 10% less anisotropic dose distribution than seeds containing a silver wire with the 1-125 adsorbed onto it. An interpolative method was developed for fast dose calculations taking this anisotropy into account

School district responses to matching aid programs for capital facilities: A case study of New York's building aid program

States are financing a larger share of capital investment by school districts but little is known about district response to facility aid programs. This paper addresses this gap by examining how a short-term increase in the matching rate for the Building Aid program in New York affected district capital investment decisions. We estimate a capital investment model and find that most districts are responsive to price incentives but that price responsiveness is related to the fiscal health and urban location of the district, we provide recommendations for the design of capital investment aid programs to support high-need urban districts

Economic Change and Fiscal Planning: The Origins of the Fiscal Crisis in New York State

What can policy makers learn from the fiscal experience of New York during the 1980s? By most measures, the state went from a position of fiscal strength in the early 1980s to fiscal crisis by the end of the decade. In their analysis of demographic, social, economic, and fiscal patterns, Roy Bahl and William Duncombe show that the lack of long-term fiscal planning and short-term discipline were the root causes of the turnabout. They call for greater use of both, as well as tax reforms that will better reflect the changing reality of local and state economies

Anaesthesia in the MRI suite

Anaesthesia in the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) suite, or when performing surgery that requires MRI guidance, is becoming a more frequent and complex procedure for anaesthetists, as the study modality is increasing in application. MRI is not inert in its ability to do harm and may interfere with the anaesthetist’s ability to assess the patient and intervene in the event of emergencies. Strong superconducting magnets can affect the physical environment and present unseen yet pertinent dangers, which may be avoided through awareness and vigilance. A culture of safety and collaboration in the radiology department, an area that is often remote from the usual milieu that anaesthetic providers are comfortable with, is essential to preventing serious injury or death to both patients and staff. It is therefore an important domain of knowledge and expertise for an anaesthetist. This article also describes some of the difficulties occasionally apparent only to the anaesthetic provider, which warrants anaesthetists’ involvement in the planning and layout of MRI suites.Keywords: anaesthesia, emergencies in MRI, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), MRI safety, radiolog

Does Whole-School Reform Boost Student Performance? The Case of New York City

Thousands of schools around the country have implemented whole-school reform programs to boost student performance. This paper uses quasi-experimental methods to estimate the impact of whole-school reform on students\u27 reading performance in New York City, where various reform programs were adopted in dozens of troubled elementary schools in the mid-1990s. This paper complements studies based on random assignment by examining a broad-based reform effort and explicitly accounting for implementation quality. Two popular reform programs--the School Development and Success for All--do not significantly increase reading scores but might have if they had been fully implemented. The More Effective Schools program does boost reading scores, particularly for the poorest students, but only when program trainers remain in the school and the students are native English speakers

Estimating the Cost of an Adequate Education in New York

The New York State Board of Regents and Commissioner of Education have identified a set of clear performance standards for students in New York State that matches the knowledge and skills they will need to function successfully as productive citizens in the 21st century. To match these standards, the New York State Department of Education has developed new Regents Examinations, which all students will be required to pass to graduate from high school, and new examinations in 4th and 8th grades that serve as important intermediate checkpoints in assessing student progress. Justice Leland DeGrasse wrote in *Campaign for Fiscal Equity v. State of New York* (719 N.Y.S.2d 475, 150 Ed. Law Rep. 834, January 9, 2001) that [T]he court holds that the education provided New York City students is so deficient that it falls below the constitutional floor set by the Education Article of the New York Constitution (p. 4). He continued, In the course of reforming the school finance system, a threshold task that must be performed by defendants is ascertaining, to the extent possible, the actual costs of providing a sound basic education in districts around the State (p. 115). The objective of this study is to develop estimates of the costs of financing the achievement of higher standards. The key tools employed to estimate the cost of adequacy are education cost functions and cost of education indexes. The cost function approach uses statistical methods to extract from actual data the relationship between characteristics of students, the cost of living in an area, and the spending required to meet different performance standards. As long as recent history is a good predictor of the near future, the cost function approach should provide reasonably accurate estimates of the cost of adequacy