As the U.S. continues to embrace a comprehensive plan for economic recovery, this article investigates the validity of the claim that investing in higher education will help restore state economic growth and prosperity. It presents the findings from a study that indicates that the most consistent predictors of state economic growth related to…

In recent years, the number of charter schools in Florida has doubled. We examine five years of data on students moving into these schools from the traditional public sector. We consider student attributes and the school and district contexts that they are leaving. The better students are performing relative to their peers, the less likely they…

High teacher turnover in large U.S. cities is a critical issue for schools and districts, and the students they serve; but surprisingly little work has been done to develop methodologies and standards that districts and schools can use to make reliable estimates of turnover costs. Even less is known about how to detect variations in turnover costs…

The purpose of this study was to develop a model that may be used to estimate the financial costs of teacher turnover in urban school districts. It is estimated that 50% of the beginning teachers leave the profession within the first five years on the job (Murname, Singer, Wilett, Kemple, and Olsen 1991; Colbert and Wolff 1992; Ingersoll 2003;…

This research investigates state finance policies for public elementary and secondary education using survey methodology. The purpose is to update the existing knowledge base in the field as well as to provide a compendium of finance and policy options that are being used across the states to finance school for lawmakers, educators and others.…

This article uses survival analysis to investigate the symptoms of fiscal distress that can lead to significant reductions in instructional expenditures by independent public school districts in the United States. We hypothesize that the likelihood of significant reductions in instructional expenditures is positively correlated with revenue…

Nearly half a century of lottery scholarship has measured lottery tax incidence predominantly through either the Suits Index or regression analysis. The present study builds on historic lottery tax burden measurement to present a comprehensive set of tools to determine the tax incidence of individual games in addition to determining which lottery…

The goal of this study is to simultaneously explore resource allocation across schools within large urban school districts and across all schools within major metropolitan areas that include those urban districts in the state of Texas. This study uses a three-year panel, from 2005 to 2007, for Texas elementary schools in the Houston, Dallas,…

The purpose of this research was to address the public policy of adequacy by the creation of a Florida state-wide poverty index model to assist in the distribution of state and local dollars in funding public education. This poverty index model would measure the amount and severity of poverty in every public school within the state each year and…

Student retention and low graduation rates are the most significant problems associated with state provided student aid. Evidence suggests that the problems are chronic to certain populations in state colleges and universities. This research examines lottery scholarship data to determine those factors that affect scholarship retention and…

Korea is recognized as a high-performing country in international achievement studies; however, many researchers in and outside Korea have been worried about the existing gaps between high-socioeconomic and low-socioeconomic (SES) students in both student achievement and educational resources. We analyzed the resource and output equity of Korean…

School-based instructional coaching is an increasingly popular approach to professional development used to support in-service learning for teachers. However, little is known about the cost of coaching. The following study aims to fill this gap. First, the study describes a framework for measuring the cost of an instructional coaching program;…

Severe fiscal tensions threaten U.S. public higher education. Many policy solutions have been suggested, but it is difficult to subject these qualitative ideas to rigorous empirical evaluation. In this work, we employ an agent-based model of a representative state-funded public university system (including a flagship campus, an urban campus, and…

This study considers the relationship between federal academic earmarks and state appropriations for higher education. Often referred to as "pork," federal academic earmarks are both controversial and understudied. Using a unique panel dataset which spans 1990-2006, this study conducts a panel analysis with two-way state and year-fixed effects. It…

Although benefits can be a sizable part of an educator's total compensation, there has been little scholarly inquiry into the state pension plans for educators. Despite the fact that all defined benefit plans rely on the same basic formula for calculating annual pensions, they vary across states in the multiplier used, the method for calculating…