To address gaps in achievement between more- and less-affluent students, states and districts need to ensure that high-poverty students and schools have equitable access to educational resources. Traditionally, assessments of resource equity have focused on per-pupil expenditures and more proximal inputs, such as teacher credentials and class…

This brief utilizes the most recent and rigorous financial aid research to inform state higher education leaders about innovative and effective financial aid practices. By simplifying aid eligibility requirements, improving the aid application process, and engaging in early awareness efforts, states could improve the effectiveness of existing aid…

Policy briefs written by academics--the kind typically published in "Education Finance and Policy"--should be a crucial source of information for policy makers. Yet too frequently these briefs fail to garner the consideration they deserve. Their authors are too focused on the potential objections of their fellow academics, who are…

Strategic Performance Indicators (SPIs) are summary measures derived from parallel, descriptive analyses conducted across educational agencies. The SPIs are designed to inform agency management and efforts to improve student outcomes. We developed the SPIs to reveal patterns common across partner agencies, to highlight exceptions to those…

Policy makers and researchers are intrigued with but also frequently frustrated by each other. Although these differences are understandable and predictable, it is clear that research on a variety of educational issues has been both influential and valuable in the development of policy and practice. There is much to suggest that researchers and…

It has been a busy time for the Association of Education Finance and Policy (AEFP). Over the past few years the association has acquired a new name, a new journal, and many new members. The 2012 annual conference, convened in Boston last March, proved to be the largest conference in the association's thirty-seven-year history, with 556 members in…

Students' experiences and the opportunities they have to learn rest on the quality of education decisions made in each classroom, in each school, in each district, and in each state, federal legislature, and department of education. The role of research and scholarship more broadly in education finance and policy is to inform these decisions for…

One of the major story lines of the growth of civilization is the advance of the experiment. From the food we eat to the diseases we conquer to our understanding of how we think and behave, we have profited enormously from an approach that marries our models of the world with tests of their validity through systematic variation to determine cause…

Randomized trials are a common way to provide rigorous evidence on the impacts of education programs. This article discusses the trade-offs associated with study designs that involve random assignment of students within schools and describes the experience from one such study of Teach for America (TFA). The TFA experiment faced challenges with…

Given scarce resources for evaluation, we recommend that education researchers more frequently conduct comprehensive randomized trials that generate evidence on how, why, and under what conditions interventions succeed or fail in producing effects. Recent experience evaluating a randomized need-based financial aid intervention highlights some of…

The Project on Incentives in Teaching (POINT) was a three-year study testing the hypothesis that rewarding teachers for improved student scores on standardized tests would cause scores to rise. Results, as described in Springer et al. (2010b), did not confirm this hypothesis. In this article we provide additional information on the POINT study…

The Measures of Effective Teaching project has collected performance data using multiple indicators from over three thousand teachers across six urban districts. In the second year of the study, classes of students were randomly assigned to teachers in order to assess the impact of assignment bias on performance judgments. This article discusses…

Research based on randomized experiments (along with high-quality quasi-experiments) has gained traction in education circles in recent years. There is little doubt this has been driven in large part by the shift in research funding strategy by the Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences under Grover Whitehurst's lead, described…

We propose an efficiency-based mechanism for state funding of public colleges and universities using data envelopment analysis. We describe the philosophy and the mathematics that underlie the approach and apply\break the proposed model to data from 362 U.S. public four-year colleges and universities. The model provides incentives to institution…

Education reform advocates who base policy decisions on empirical research often face the argument that because background variables explain so much of student outcomes, it follows that policy interventions cannot be effective. This policy brief explains the logical fallacy in the argument, illustrating with two examples, one taken from the…