In Massachusetts, state aid to public schools fills the gap between a district's foundation budget and its required local contribution. Historic inequities in required local contributions and the resulting inequities in state aid across districts led to a call for education finance reform. Since 2007, the state has put in place a number of…

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…

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…

Public school funding in Massachusetts is based on foundation budget principles. However, funding formula modifications often create disparities between district foundation budgets and actual required spending levels. This study provides an in-depth look at Massachusetts' state aid formulas used between 2004 and 2009 and utilizes two approaches to…

This article considers the role of higher education in state budgets. It empirically models and tests the balance wheel hypothesis in a robust framework. The balance wheel model posits that in good economic times, higher education is an attractive area for states to fund and tends to be funded at a higher rate than other state budget categories.…

Beginning in 1997, a series of Ohio Supreme Court decisions ruled that Ohio's school foundation-based funding system was unconstitutional. Despite judicially mandated reform directives, little change was made until recently when Ohio adopted a modified Evidence-Based Model (EBM) into its statutory funding scheme. Ohio's EBM is intended to remedy…

Public elementary and secondary education, a vast, uneven and complex system, is the most significant cost to local government and one of the largest costs to state government in Virginia. Meeting this cost has become even more difficult as the state and nation continue to struggle with the most severe economic downturn since the Great Depression.…

Fiscal disparities within school districts may be the next area "ripe" for litigation. Equity and adequacy litigation have largely focused on between-district fiscal disparities. Research suggests that within-district disparities may be as unfair to high poverty schools. When the school funding pie is not growing, remedying within-district fiscal…

This study was designed to explore fiscal interrelationships that underlay capital outlay funding, including the differences between rural and non-rural school districts. The study additionally focused on the relationships between various capital outlay funding components (capital outlay expenditures per pupil, net assessed valuation per pupil,…

Congress has recently focused on the complex relationship between federal student aid, states' funding appropriations for higher education, and institutional tuition and fee levels. Fueling this focus is the ongoing cost shit in public higher education, from states to students and families, as well as to the federal government via student aid…

The fiscal capacity of a school district measures the difference between a district's ability to raise revenues locally and the expenditures needed to provide some specified level of educational services. This article uses several different approaches to calculate fiscal capacity for school districts in Ohio from 1996 to 2006. The results show…

For decades, state funding of public historically black colleges and universities (HBCU) has been shown to be de facto discriminatory relative to the funding of their predominately white counterparts. Although the dual system has been legally dismantled, the disparate funding has remained in place in a number of ways. For example, recent research…

This overview provides a synthesis of a comprehensive survey of school finance programs in the 50 states conducted in 2006-07. Information was provided by chief state school finance officers or persons with expertise in a state's public school funding-allocation system. Brief descriptions of the major Pre-K-12 funding formulae, district-based…

School finance adequacy litigation has become a widely-used means in the efforts to improve educational outcomes for children. This form of litigation has been attempted in nearly every state over the past two decades. Despite its prevalence, its effectiveness remains questionable due to a lack of study relating finance litigation to student…

The goal of this study is to apply a conventional education cost-function approach for estimating the sensitivity of cost models and predicted education costs to the inclusion of school district level racial composition variables and further to test whether race neutral alternatives sufficiently capture the additional costs associated with school…