After years of non-stop increases--national k-12 per-pupil spending is up by "one-third" in inflation-adjusted dollars since 1995--schools now face the near-certainty of repeated annual budget cuts for the first time since the Great Depression. In some states and districts, reductions will be dramatic--well into the double digits. And…

This report is the final result of a six-year study of America's school finance system, including more than 30 separate studies at a cost of $6 million and involving an interdisciplinary team of more than 40 scholars including many of the country's best known economists, policy analysts, lawyers, and specialists in school finance, instruction,…

State and federal accountability systems are pressuring public schools to improve the performance of low-achieving students. To respond, schools must be able to recruit and retain high-quality teachers, strengthen curricula, and take other steps to provide struggling students with the help they need. But such efforts are expensive and, as the…

Reform efforts involving school finance have focused on the state's role in equalizing expenditures across all districts within a state. Despite these efforts, little attention has been given to differing expenditures among school within districts. In analyzing differences in spending across schools and students in Cincinnati, Seattle, and…

When the Cincinnati Public Schools devised a reform strategy for improving student performance, it became clear that the district's traditional budgeting system was inadequate. Traces the district's process of moving to a system of student-based budgeting linking funding equity and flexibility to accountability and excellence. (MLF)

Recent policy changes at the state and federal levels have made schools the focus of accountability. However, under current district budgeting practices, it is difficult to assess how resources are distributed between schools and whether every school is afforded the same opportunity to meet its educational goals. This paper addresses one key…

This document presents the first results of a series of studies on within-district spending patterns. It provides an overview of some early analysis of variations in spending among schools within three unnamed school districts. The study was conducted with the hope of motivating district leaders and school activists to investigate their own…

School district budgets typically hide as much as they reveal. Superintendents are finding this as they discover huge deficits that nobody saw coming. District budgets are opaque by design, and they often mask important facts about resource allocation within a district, as well as about total spending. This paper reports the results of an original…

Despite the fact that funding for Title I continues to grow, and the program is now the major funding arm of "No Child Left Behind", the research reported here indicates that funds are not always spent in a way likely to accomplish the purposes of the legislation. In most urban districts a systematic bias is built into the district allocation…

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…