During the late 1990s, North Carolina's education finance mechanism--known as the Public School Fund (PSF)--was challenged in a series of litigation known as "Leandro v. State of North Carolina". Though the State Supreme Court's analyses left the state's finance mechanism unchanged, there remains to date no systematic evaluation of the fiscal…

Institutional performance was a topic given considerable attention by the Commission on the Future of Higher Education. Florida's Community College System responded to the challenge by committing to increase performance-based funding allocations from less than 2% to 5% of total state appropriations. Results of the analysis indicated that…

This article extends the author's previous domestic analysis of tax policy and education finance under the moral principles of Judeo-Christian ethics to the international arena, beginning with an examination of the English-speaking OECD countries, which are the most economically and culturally similar to the United States. Although the tax and…

United States Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for a plurality of the Court in "Mitchell v. Helms" in 2000, advanced the idea that state constitutional prohibitions against public funding of religious schools were manifestations of anti-Catholic bigotry in the late 19th century. Thomas's reading of history and law led him to believe…

The Illinois Supreme Court has permitted the General Assembly to create a system of public school funding that is widely disparate and disadvantageous to students in school districts with low-property wealth. In this Article, I argue that the court has not adequately considered the nexus between the Uniformity of Taxation provision and the…

Recently, spending and fees at colleges and universities have been rising faster than family incomes. If this trend persists, increasing emphasis will be placed on endowments as a source of finance. This paper examines financial planning when growth rates for the sources and uses of funds differ. First, we examine concepts of "intergenerational…

Changes in the financial situations among the second tier of liberal arts colleges between 1996 and 2001 are documented using Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System financial and enrollment data. These data show large disparities in net assets per student, expenses per student, and the subsidies per full-paying student and the average…

This article discusses the methods and results of a study designed to determine the cost of education under the curriculum frameworks and state laws in a northeastern state after major education reform and a judicial decision finding the system inadequate and unconstitutional. The study is designed to determine the funding levels necessary for…

In the 1990s, Tennessee transformed its educational finance landscape through a series of equity litigation known as "Small Schools v. Tennessee I, II, and III," yet there has been no longitudinal evaluation of the efficacy of the changes in the state's education finance mechanism or the concomitant expenditure distributions. Therefore, this…

Allowing public funds to be used for tuition and other expenses in private schools through a voucher system has been the source of debate in legislative and educational forums for almost half a century, but only recently have school vouchers become a serious school reform strategy. This article provides a brief overview of the voucher plans…

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…

The California Supreme Court catalyzed school finance litigation with its rulings in the "Serrano v. Priest" cases. The court's required that wealth-related spending differences essentially be eliminated, the legislation required to implement that decision, and the passage of Proposition 13's property tax limitation has resulted in dramatically…

Although the notions of vertical and horizontal equity are straightforward, constructing valid measures of each has proven difficult in states that make revenue adjustments for multiple factors. In this article we introduce an alternative approach for assessing horizontal and vertical equity that addresses this problem. This approach is based on…

Using school-level descriptive data, this study examined the distribution of teachers in the Commonwealth of Kentucky in an attempt to build on previous research concerning the equity of the finance system in the state. Rather than focusing on revenue from the perspective of horizontal equity, this study used human resource data to examine the…

The primary objective of this study was to examine revenue generation and resource allocation and deployment practices associated with the implementation of three smaller learning communities (SLC) project high schools in a single school district. The study used a variation of Levin and McEwan's (2001) ingredients approach. District- and…