This paper examines how school districts change teacher salaries in response to large changes in revenue. Using district-level salary schedule data for nearly all California school districts, we analyze two time periods: one with a decrease in funding (2007-08 to 2011-12 marked by the Great Recession) and one with a significant increase in funding…

How are teacher pension benefits funded? Under traditional plans, the full cost of career teachers' benefits far exceeds the contributions designated for them. The gap between the two has three pieces, which may (with some license) be mnemonically tagged the three R's of pension funding: "redistribution," "return," and…

As part of its effort to make universal prekindergarten (UPK) available to four-year-olds, California has recently expanded transitional kindergarten (TK) in its public schools. TK will be a full pre-K grade level in all districts by the 2025-26 school year. Other states that seek to broaden access to early care and education (ECE) can learn…

Guided by a Geography of Opportunity framework and using Arc Geographic Information Systems (ArcGIS) mapping, we sought to explore how and to what extent California Community Colleges baccalaureate programs graduates' expected earnings are likely to meet the Self-Sufficiency Standard and afford fair market rent for the region in which they are…

This article examines how teacher collective bargaining agreements (CBAs), teacher salaries, and class sizes changed during the Great Recession. Using a district-level data set of California teacher CBAs that includes measures of subarea contract strength and salaries from 2005-2006 and 2011-2012 tied to district-level longitudinal data, we…

Federal school finance policy over the past 30 years has focused on resource allocation within school districts. Regulations require equal staffing across schools, particularly Title I schools, which are designated based on the percent of low-income students enrolled. The requirement to equalize staffing levels creates a loophole where, even with…

A recent survey of 41 different state boards of education revealed that officials from 28 states indicate that they are experiencing teacher shortages. The shortages in some states are significant. While the teacher shortage in many states is tied to different factors, one frequently cited reason for leaving the teaching profession is low pay.…

Performance accountability systems are increasingly utilized by state legislatures to hold community colleges more accountable for student outcomes and responsible spending through the linking of state funding to specific outputs. Through these actions, it is reasonable expect an emphasis on institutional performance to permeate into a community…

The Every Student Succeeds Act gives states greater flexibility in designing educational policy, but questions remain about whether and how states will use this opportunity to design truly innovative new policies to support higher levels of student learning. The authors describe how educational leaders in four states--California, Iowa, New…

On February 24, 2017, all of the authors of the state-of-the-state manuscripts published in the "Journal of Education Finance" met in Cincinnati, Ohio, to participate in a roundtable discussion focused on recent legislative actions in 38 states. A majority of those papers were revised to reflect a final report on legislative actions…

We use data from 2015-2016 to document faculty representation and wage gaps by race-ethnicity and gender in six fields at selective public universities. Consistent with widely available information, Black, Hispanic, and female professors are underrepresented and White and Asian professors are overrepresented in our data. Disadvantaged minority and…

In recent years, a principal supply shortage crisis has emerged in the USA. This problem has been exacerbated by an increase in principal departures, which has been found to be negatively related to school outcomes. While research exists on several determinants of principal turnover, any examination of the relationship between principals'…

The gender wage gap in the United States is a well-documented social and economic phenomenon. The Equal Pay Act of 1963 has done little to bring parity between men's and women's wages. Existing data show a relationship between race, age, geography, immigration, education, and women's pay status. This study analyzes wage disparity within higher…

We outline structures of whiteness and analyze how forms of dominance embedded and enacted in higher education structures have been made salient, through a self-reflexive account of the authors' anti-cuts organizing. The authors implicate themselves, reflexively incorporating positions as a white, female, working class-raised doctoral student and…

If cash-strapped universities want an easy way to save money, Lawrence B. Martin, a professor of anthropology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, has an idea. By tallying faculty output in areas such as publication rates in scientific journals, Mr. Martin has concluded that there could be as much as $1-billion to $2-billion in…