As states reckon with racial enrollment and attainment gaps in higher education, some have made efforts to address them through their higher education funding. Two common approaches are outcomes-based funding (OBF) and Promise programs, as each can be designed with an explicit race equity lens. This report summarizes a two-year study examining the…

The Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 requires states to use a variety of indicators, including standardized tests and attendance records, to designate schools for support and improvement based on schoolwide performance and the performance of groups of students within schools. Schoolwide and group-level performance indicators are also…

A growing number of states have policies that positively address resource equity in school construction, distributing capital resources based on district wealth (although as addressed in this brief, these policies are not always implemented with actual funding), but almost no states require any consideration of diversity or segregation in their…

This document provides the appendix to the report, "Charter School Funding: Support for Students with Disabilities" (see ED615383). "Charter School Funding" studies the funding surrounding the education of students with disabilities in public charter schools using data from fiscal year 2018 in 18 cities where charters hold a…

In order to build an inclusive economy State leaders have recognized the critical importance of postsecondary attainment in meeting economic and equity goals. Nearly every state has, or is considering a postsecondary education attainment goal, which sets a threshold for the number of people within that state who hold some type of postsecondary…

While the importance of the period from birth to age three as the most promising and possibly consequential stage of human development has gained attention over the last quarter century, public investments in children's early learning opportunities have remained inadequate. The nation, as well as the state of New Jersey, invests the fewest public…

While funding cuts are often necessary during economic downturns, reducing state investments in higher education will hamper recovery. If cuts are inevitable, a one-size-fits-all approach will undermine states' ability to meet future talent needs and ensure equitable opportunity. State leaders should evaluate funding decisions based on their…

The May 2012 State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA) report, "The Broadband Imperative: Recommendations to Address K-12 Education Infrastructure Needs," pushed educators and policy makers nationwide to increase high-speed broadband access in schools, with specific recommendations regarding access, funding, and policies…

Darling-Hammond, Wilhoit, and Pittenger (2014) addressed the need for states to align their accountability systems with new college- and career-ready learning standards. The authors recommended a new accountability paradigm that focuses on 1) meaningful learning, enabled by 2) professionally skilled and committed educators, and supported by 3)…

Raising academic standards and eliminating achievement gaps between advantaged and disadvantaged students are America's prime national educational goals. Current federal and state policies, however, largely ignore the fact that the childhood poverty rate in the United States is 21%, the highest in the industrialized world, and that poverty…

This paper considers those factors that have been at work shaping educational policy at the state level in New Jersey. For simplicity and to permit a degree of comparison among the states, five questions are addressed: (1) What have been the effects of court intervention, (2) Are "new" political coalitions being formed and how effective…

Faced with a December deadline imposed by the State's highest court, New Jersey's legislature will soon convene in an extraordinary special session to consider a controversial proposal for changing the State's system of financing public education. Discusses that proposal and the current system for school finance. (Author/JF)

The goal of this study is to apply a conventional education cost-function approach for estimating the sensitivity of cost models and predicted education costs to the inclusion of school district level racial composition variables and further to test whether race neutral alternatives sufficiently capture the additional costs associated with school…

Presents the full text of the New Jersey case that found the method of financing public education in that State to be in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. (JF)

The first part of this document (and Appendix A) focuses on New Jersey as a microcosm of the problems, questions, and issues involved in revising the existing system of how school costs are paid. New Jersey is particularly suited for such analysis because for years it depended heavily on the local school property tax, to an even greater extent…