This article contributes to our understanding of American education politics by exploring when and why states redistribute K-12 education dollars to poorer schools. It does so by examining three explanations for intrastate changes in progressivity: court-ordered finance reforms, political trends, and demographic changes. Using state-level data…

The State Indicators Database (SID), which is the School Finance Indicators Database's (SFID) primary product, includes approximately 125 variables, but this report focuses on three key school finance measures: fiscal effort, adequacy, and progressivity. This report discusses how states' systems tend to mediate the impact of economic downturns and…

When it comes to American education, few policy areas are as misunderstood -- or as crucial -- as school finance. Over the past several years, a political and empirical consensus has emerged about the importance of equitable and adequate school funding for high quality K-12 education. In other words, the evidence is clear that money does, indeed,…

When it comes to American education, few policy areas are as misunderstood -- or as crucial -- as school finance. Over the past several years, a political and empirical consensus has emerged about the importance of equitable and adequate school funding for high-quality K-12 education. Certainly, there are plenty of contentious debates about how…

The most terrible and lasting effects of the coronavirus pandemic will of course be measured in loss of life. But a parallel tragedy will also be unfolding in the coming months and years, this one affecting those at the beginning of their lives: an unprecedented school funding crisis that threatens to disadvantage a generation of children. School…

New federal regulations (State Plans to Ensure Equitable Access to Excellent Educators)1 place increased pressure on states and local public school districts to improve their measurement and reporting of gaps in teacher qualifications across schools and the children they serve. Yet a sole focus on resource disparities between schools within a…

The Great Recession's effect on state school finance systems was unlike previous downturns in the early 1990s and early 2000s in that it: a) involved a greater loss of taxable income in many states, thus greater loss to state general fund revenues, b) also involved a substantial collapse of housing markets and related reduction or at least…

While the United States was recovering from the recent economic stress caused by the Great Recession, individual state economies were improving at a slow pace. In 2012, state education budgets came to a crossroads, as most states had exhausted their allocations of federal stimulus dollars. Prior editions of this report noted how many states used…

The third edition of the National Report Card examines the condition of states' finance systems as the country emerges from the Great Recession, but is still wrestling with its consequences. As in prior editions, this Third Edition of the National Report Card continues to make the case for states to take immediate and longer-term action to improve…

In the education world, the existence of funding inequities has long been a known fact, but the sources of these inequities have not always been obvious. Typically, local property tax variation has been blamed as the sole, or at least primary, cause of inequalities and called for greater state funding as the solution. In practice, however, it is…

In July of 2018, the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans released a comprehensive, summative longitudinal report on the effects on student outcomes of the package of reforms implemented in New Orleans following hurricane Katrina in the fall of 2005. This policy brief reviews the findings of this report by Douglas Harris and Matthew Larsen,…

Federal and state governments in the United States make extensive use of student poverty rates in compensatory aid programs like Title I. Unfortunately, the measures of student poverty that drive funding allocations under such programs are biased because they fail to reflect geographic differences in the cost of living. In this study, we construct…

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…

This article applies the education cost function methodology in order to estimate additional costs associated with black student concentration and with alternative, race-neutral measures of urban poverty. Recent research highlights the continued importance of the role of race in educational outcomes, and how the intersection of peer group effects…

Building a more accurate, reliable and consistent method of analyzing how states fund public education starts with a critical question: What is fair school funding? In this report, "fair" school funding is defined as a state finance system that ensures equal educational opportunity by providing a sufficient level of funding distributed…