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…

Legal scrutiny of school voucher policies initially focused on the establishment clause concerning with allocating public dollars to schools sponsored by religious organizations. In recent years, advocates asserted that the exclusion of faith-based organizations from voucher plans that permit expenditures in secular private organizations violates…

In the 1990s, teachers' and other educators' salaries increased enough to make Georgia number one in salaries in the South and solidly in the Midwest across the nation. Since 2004, school districts have been trying to make do with much less as this recession continues to force more cuts. Georgia has a very high unemployment rate of 10.25%, a high…

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…

March 24, 2007, marked a decade since the Ohio Supreme Court first ruled that the state school funding system was unconstitutional. Further, "DeRolph I" was followed by three more Ohio State Supreme Court decisions regarding the issue. Although the judicial decisions of "DeRolph I and II", reinforced by "DeRolph IV", clearly identified the legal…

John Kenneth Galbraith proposed a test for the "good society" that deals directly with the financing of education. The Arizona Constitution may require that the legislature establish and maintain a "general and uniform" public school system, but, as the author argues in this article, the chronicle of the school funding cases in Arizona is more of…

This article presents a cross-section, 50-state analysis of school finance legislation from the 2000 session and a seven-year trend analysis, dating back to 1994. The framework for analysis was grounded in the theory of intergovernmental grants. Although the 2000 legislative session was an active one, the total number of bills passed represented a…

Voters in the State of Michigan reformed K-12 school financing significantly in 1994. The reform largely removed local government from playing a role in the determination of school finance and lodged this authority mainly with state government. In this article we examine the long-term impacts of the reform legislation. We find that although the…

Adequacy is a key issue propelled by high court decisions across the states. Initially the equity of funding systems that resulted in "savage inequalities" between school districts within a state based on property wealth was at issue. However, just since 1989, with the state supreme court decision in Kentucky finding the system unconstitutional…

This article proposes a general conception of educational adequacy and draws on a lengthy history of economic theory and emerging empirical evidence to support that conception. The author reviews empirical methods for measuring educational adequacy and synthesizes findings from a number of recent studies of the cost of an adequate education. He…

The fight over school funding in most states involves a long battle in the courts that may span several years and never have a definitive endpoint because resistance to adequate funding of public schools appears to be endemic to government processes. The "DeRolph" case, first filed by the plaintiffs in December 1991, is one such legal battle over…

The fight over school funding in most states involves a long battle in the courts that may span several years and never have a definitive endpoint because resistance to adequate funding of public schools appears to be endemic to government processes. The "DeRolph" case, first filed by the plaintiffs in December 1991, is one such legal battle over…

This article studies the effects of earmarking state lottery profits for education. Because educational expenditures generally exceed the funds earmarked for education by a wide margin, nothing prevents state legislators from using earmarked funds to replace rather than augment funds that would have gone to education in the absence of earmarking.…

Canadian humorist Steven Leacock once told a story about a jockey who became so upset over bad news that he leaped on his horse and rode off in all directions. According to this author, that action well summarizes the condition of the State of Arkansas after receiving a Supreme Court order to provide an equal and adequate education to the children…

Reviews recent state and federal rural school funding litigation. Concludes that while rural school advocates have been relatively successful in the courts, efforts to obtain adequate state funding for rural schools through the legislative process are only partially successful. (Contains 16 references.)(PKP)