As the economic outlook continues to darken, school districts will be looking for ways to cut costs, and they will no doubt wrestle with some difficult issues. When does it make sense to keep classes small? When does it make sense to increase class sizes to cut costs? Such debates are often carried out in the absence of information about what…

As attention shifts to how districts allocate resources to schools, student weighted allocation has emerged as an alternative to traditional staff-based allocation policies. Student-weighted allocation uses student need, rather than staff placement, as the building block of school budgeting. This article examines how the shift to student-weighted…