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…

Researchers have long searched for a relationship between school resources and student achievement. The search for this relationship has relied heavily on the use of education production functions. Despite years of research on this topic, there has been little agreement concerning which resources are the most essential variables to increase…

The standard benefit incidence algebra generally produces biased estimates of the distribution of public spending on education when students from poor and rich families are enrolled in schools that receive different levels of public spending per student. Except in very rare instances, removing these biases entails combining several sources of…

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…

The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act is the largest incursion of the federal government into education in American history. More than $12 billion is attached to unprecedented requirements for all students, poor and nonpoor, to reach a level of academic proficiency. Title I and its NCLB reauthorization explicitly allot funds to individual schools…

The inscription on the internal pedestal of the Statue of Liberty proclaiming "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses" today is an ideal of another age. Compared with those of other developing countries, U.S. poverty rates are extraordinarily high, as are the odds of remaining in poverty intergenerationally. No longer do immigrants…

Fiscal equity in public education has been a substantive issue with a long history in school finance literature. However, the growing demands of capital outlay financing are given little or no attention in typical equity funding schemes. Currently, school districts throughout the nation are faced with the need to finance the construction,…

This article provides an assessment of the current and emerging approaches used by state governments in allocating funding for higher education institutions and programs. It reviews a number of desired characteristics or outcomes for state higher education funding models, including equity, adequacy, stability, and flexibility. Although there is…

Most research on the association between school resources and student outcomes has concentrated on finances as measured in dollars. This study takes a fresh look at the issue by focusing on the allocation of real resources, defined as the personnel and materiel used to increase student learning, which are more relevant measures of a school's…

In this article, the authors present the results of a research study in which they used two national datasets to construct and examine a model that estimates relative faculty instructional costs for specific undergraduate degree programs and also identifies differences in these costs by region and institutional type. They conducted this research…

The first section of this article examines the historical record of Ohio's Second Constitutional Convention in an effort to discern what the delegates meant by "thorough and efficient" system of education. Included in this analysis are other historical documents that give further indication of the intent of the delegates. A brief review of the…

The purpose of compensatory education is grounded in the history and practice of addressing the effects of poverty on teaching and learning. The intended purpose of compensatory education was to provide additional investment in human capital for low-income students to compensate for the higher investments in human capital afforded to more…

This study demonstrates a method for extending debates on the effectiveness of school inputs into the cost-effectiveness realm. This study uses the example of Florida's statewide initiative to reduce class sizes to determine which of many state inputs buys the most effect for the same expenditure. The method includes a three-stage process:…

Subsidies to higher education in the United States have long been guided by the belief that policy should encourage college attendance. In principle, if not always in practice, policy has for some time sought to accomplish this by addressing college affordability. General subsidies that keep tuition at public institutions low are coupled with…

Every school reform initiative promises to improve some aspect of schooling and, ultimately, the academic performance of the target schools and their students. The reform's cost often determines not only whether the particular initiative is implemented but also how the reform is implemented. Analyzing the cost-effectiveness of a programmatic or…