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…

Recent changes in public school educational finance in the state of Kansas are shown to have had little positive effect on student educational achievement. A differences structure is used to determine the effect of changes in revenue per student at the district level on changes in measures of student achievement. Measures of achievement employed…

A shortcoming of the conventional ordinary least squares (OLS) approaches for estimating median voter models of education demand is the inability to more fully explain the spatial relationships between neighboring school districts. Consequently, two school districts that appear to be descriptively similar in terms of conventional measures of…

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…

Over the past few decades, a handful of states have chosen to provide state financing of special education programs through a method referred to as "Census-Based" funding--an approach which involves allocated block-grant funding on an assumed basis of uniform distribution of children with disabilities across school districts. The approach has been…

Using a reduced form version of a theoretical expansion of Hoxby's (1996) education production model, we investigate whether bargaining teachers unions are a boon or a bust to the economy of the state. We anticipate teachers, being in the public sector veiled from competition, are less likely to be efficient. Yet, their product, education,…

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…

Spending by states and local school districts on school construction has increased dramatically over the last decade, not only because more and higher-quality schools are being built, but also because construction costs have increased by an unprecedented degree. Many states struggle to afford the new schools needed in local communities. The…

This article examines the relative production efficiency of school districts in Georgia using the modified quadriform method. Overall, we find that the modified quadriform allows state-level policymakers to access a basic tool for analysis that makes relative comparison of school district productivity for use in policy analysis and policy…

This article outlines a framework for evaluating the decision of undergraduate students to engage in term-time employment as a method of financing higher education. We then examine the impact of work on academic achievement and find that employment has modest negative effects on student grades, with a grade point average (GPA) falling by 0.007…

This study investigates what factors are associated with the likelihood of passing school facility construction bonds by local district election. It uses statewide data from Michigan, 1998-2006, to examine the outcome of 789 bond elections in terms of the following ten variables: amount of the bond request; district enrollment; district locale;…

In an era of increased accountability and challenging times for public finance, charter schools built on decentralization, grassroots accountability, and market forces may provide, in the spirit of "educational laboratories," lessons for increasing student achievement more efficiently through diverse and innovative management, organization,…

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…

This quantitative study investigated the degree to which financial resources supporting teachers was equitably distributed in Oklahoma. Teachers are an important resource and their importance is being increasingly emphasized as educators attempt to increase student achievement. Every student educated in Oklahoma should have an equal right to…

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…