State education finance systems play a fundamental role in providing the resources that schools and districts need to ensure student success. But modernizing and improving these systems is often complicated and can take years. Learning from their efforts to revamp education finance systems, Bellwether has found five common conditions that pave the…

Between March 2020 and March 2021, Congress allocated $189.5 billion for a new Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) Fund. The arrival of this federal aid was a lifeline for schools attempting to serve students amid the COVID-19 pandemic. This funding was distributed in a very different manner, and with very different rules and…

In an effort to reduce state spending on special education in public schools, New Jersey moved to census-based funding as part of the new school funding formula, the School Funding Reform Act (SFRA), adopted in 2008. The census approach funds all districts using the statewide average classification rate and a statewide average "excess…

Improving equity of education funding is a key to addressing social injustices in education. Weighted student funding systems are a relatively novel approach a number of large urban and suburban districts have used to try to improve the equity of school funding. In a weighted student funding (WSF) system, the dollars distributed to schools are…

In the United States, K-12 school finance is largely controlled by the states. Every year, hundreds of billions of dollars in public funds are distributed based on 51 different configurations of formulas, rules, and regulations to over 13,000 districts that vary in terms of the students they serve, their ability to raise revenue locally, and many…

Schools across the U.S. are facing substantial challenges filling positions (Bleiberg & Kraft, 2022) and are considering solutions to address potential teacher shortages. As of 2022, almost half of the States in the U.S. create or support teacher residency programs (TRPs) through statute or regulation (Education Commission of the States,…

Since 2020, the federal government has distributed almost $2 billion to American school districts to mitigate the effects of COVID-19 pandemic school closures. Released in three separate tranches through the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) fund, the Trump and Biden administrations outlined parameters for spending this…

This article introduces educational human resource researchers to Minnesota's unique tax-base sharing program in the Twin Cities metro region. It also introduces a social justice methodology called cooperation analysis for school finance research, and specifically its concept of structural justice. The article applies cooperation analysis to…

The American Rescue Plan (ARP) Act, enacted in March 2021 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, has been a lifeline for communities across the nation. The ARP Act included $122 billion to support schools through the ARP Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ARP ESSER) Fund, with a minimum of $22 billion (or 20 percent) to be spent on…

Understanding how urban school districts allocate their education funds can help school leaders create more effective budgeting strategies and provide a basis for advocating for additional funding when necessary. This report provides an overview of how urban districts distribute their financial resources, highlights key areas of spending, and…

Over the past 10-15 years, there has emerged a growing consensus, supported by high-quality empirical research, that additional funding improves student outcomes (and funding cuts hurt those outcomes), particularly among disadvantaged students. There are, of course, serious and important debates about how education funding should be spent. Yet…

This paper analyses the composition, distribution, and history of school funding in Australia through a spatial lens (Soja 2010). We explore multi-scalar school funding policy through three layers of economic maldistribution. We sketch the funding disparities between the three school sectors (public, Catholic, and independent) exposing a spatial…

Over the past 50 years, student activists and community organizers on college campuses have advocated for divestment as a strategy to enact necessary change. These activists and organizers are often tasked to confront the higher education elite, such as trustees, with these demands. Higher education institutions will only continue to face immense…

School funding in Michigan is inadequate and inequitable. Michigan does not provide a sufficient base per-pupil amount, nor does the state properly address the cost of educating students with additional needs, especially students with disabilities, English learners, and low-income students. It would cost $4.5 billion to bring districts to funding…

The recent passage of the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) is infusing America's K12 public schools with unprecedented, desperately needed relief funds to aid in the academic recovery of students in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The $122 billion allocated to K-12 public schools represents over seven times current annual Title I funding. As a…