Recent evidence suggests school resources are continually segregated from minoritized communities. This funding disparity impacts students' long-term outcomes in school and in their community. Political discourse has prioritized school defunding, privatization through vouchers and related policies, and tax relief and at the same time greater…

Hold-harmless provisions in state aid formulas are meant to restrict declines in revenues for school districts. They may take several forms, including limits on the changes in state aid from year to year, supplemental funding for districts with declining enrollment, alternatives for calculating the state aid amount, or use of past enrollments in…

Sixty-seven school finance reforms (SFRs) in 26 states have taken place since 1990; however, there is little empirical evidence on the heterogeneity of SFR effects. We provide a comprehensive description of how individual reforms affected resource allocation to low- and high-income districts within states, including both financial and…

The State Higher Education Finance (SHEF) report is produced annually by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO) to broaden understanding of the context and consequences of multiple decisions made every year in every state in each of these areas. No single report can provide definitive answers to these broad and…

Career and technical education (CTE) is increasingly seen as a major potential contributor to the recovery of the U.S. economy. However, the effectiveness and impact of the current Carl D. Perkins Act (otherwise known as Perkins IV) that governs CTE are unclear. Is the federal investment in CTE paying off? To answer this, we need to establish the…

Differential response (DR), also referred to as alternative response (AR), family assessment response (FAR), or multiple track response, was developed to incorporate family-centered, strengths-based practices into child protective services (CPS), primarily by diverting lower risk families into an assessment track rather than requiring the…

The nation's major city public school districts have substantial construction, renovation, modernization, and deferred maintenance needs because of the age and size of their school buildings, shifting populations, and the need to devote substantial resources to instructional personnel to meet their core academic mission. For instance, the average…

This report aims to help school districts deal with the challenges of newly enrolling or rapidly increasing English language learner students by offering background information and sharing the experiences of districts that have addressed similar challenges in providing services and infrastructure to support the success of English language learner…

The passage of the Kentucky Educational Reform Act (KERA) in 1990 had a dramatic impact on the funding of primary and secondary education in the state. The amount of money spent on education increased significantly with the passage of KERA with districts in rural areas of the state experiencing the largest growth in spending (Hoyt, 1999). This has…

Using school-level descriptive data, this study examined the distribution of teachers in the Commonwealth of Kentucky in an attempt to build on previous research concerning the equity of the finance system in the state. Rather than focusing on revenue from the perspective of horizontal equity, this study used human resource data to examine the…

This research into the "money matters" question revealed three attributes of Kentucky's postreform school-finance system: more financial resources were available to districts after reform; district resource-allocation patterns across expenditure functions and objects were virtually identical before and after reform; and statistically…

Equity, the driving force of the Kentucky Education Reform Act of 1990, serves as the underpinning for an array of initiatives including the Kentucky Education Technology System (KETS). Sparse research exists on decision-making practices relative to equity measures associated with the distributions of KETS resources. The purpose of this…

While much attention has been paid to educational reform or restructuring efforts to improve the nation's schools, the fiscal aspects of reform have received little attention. The Education Commission of the States studied 20 school districts in 6 states (California, Colorado, Illinois, Kentucky, Maine, and South Carolina) to determine what impact…

This study compared the equity and adequacy outcomes for plaintiff and nonplaintiff school districts as they relate to the Kentucky Education Reform Act (KERA) of 1990. Both descriptive statistics and correlation analysis were used in comparing variables and in determining the differences in selected finance measures. There were three major…

A 1996 survey of state policymakers and public college representatives in states with performance funding (Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee) is presented. Although differences exist across states in a number of areas, findings challenge the assumption of an irreconcilable gap between…