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…

The tension at the heart of pension politics is the incentive to satisfy today's claimants in the here and now at the expense of long-term concerns. Teacher pensions, in particular, pose two challenges. The first is that political incentives invite irresponsible fiscal stewardship, as public officials make outsized short-term commitments to…

The financial state of the nation's public pension funds--which provide the retirement incomes for all state employees but in most states are dominated by teachers, administrators, and other school employees--has gone from bad to worse, and is projected to continue to worsen in coming decades. A perfect storm of factors has combined in the past…

The tension at the heart of pension politics is the incentive to address today's claimants and focus on the here-and-now at the expense of long-term concerns and more dispersed constituencies. In the private sector, rules and regulations seek to tame corner-cutting and short-sighted behavior. In the public sector, the primary safeguard is the…

How schools weather budget reductions shows the difference between effective and less effective school systems. Policymakers' response to reductions depends on an array of factors: general economic conditions, access to data about future trends, community expectations and "myths," past records of school effectiveness, local education…

Practitioner papers and research papers on higher education planning and budgeting are presented. "Before the Roof Caves In: A Predictive Model for Physical Plant Renewal" by Frederick M. Biedenweg and Robert E. Hutson outlines a systematic approach that was used at Stanford University to predict the associated costs of physical plant…