Considerable attention has been paid to the most blatant barriers that public charter schools face. By lobbying against good charter legislation and fair funding, financing anti-charter studies and propaganda, filing lawsuits, and engaging the public battle of ideas, teacher unions and other charter opponents openly wage what might be called an…

This research study explores the policy expansion of school choice within the methodological approach of event history analysis. The first section provides a comparative overview of state adoption of public school choice laws. After creating a statistical portrait of the contemporary landscape for school choice, the authors introduce event history…

Education Resource Strategies (ERS) works with school and district leaders to help them more strategically use resources--people, time, and money--to improve student performance. They have found that many school districts begin creating small high schools without a clear sense of how much they will spend or how to ensure that small schools…

The funding of K-12 public schools in Ohio is a joint effort with 7.4 percent coming from the federal government, 47 percent coming from local sources and 45.6 percent coming from the state, based on FY04 revenue (the latest data available). Of the approximately $6.8 billion in state aid, about 80 percent is distributed through the Ohio School…

This short report on revenues and expenditures at the school district level is a companion to the state-level E.D. TAB, Revenues and Expenditures for Public Elementary and Secondary Education: School Year 2002-03 (NCES 2005-353R), which presents total state and national spending on public elementary and secondary education. This report provides…

This study assessed how New Jersey's state accountability system encouraged or thwarted charter school success, how effectively performance standards were defined and enacted by authorizing agents, and how individual charter schools were developing accountability processes that made them more or less successful than their charter school…

This report is the first in a series examining the policy issues relating to charter schools in Hawai'i. It addresses the overall challenges to charter schools, the law establishing a charter funding formula, a new program area of the state budget, fringe benefits, and issues needing clarification and resolution. The purpose of this series of…

Like other public schools, California charter schools are judged primarily by one measure: student test scores. Though necessary, the Academic Performance Index and Average Yearly Progress scores can't assess charter schools' broad dimensions of student learning, program effectiveness and school operations. The state's accountability system…

This report presents a study of charter schools' use of startup grants and grants under Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). For this research, case studies were conducted in 7 states that accounted for 91 percent of charter schools operating in the 1996-97 school year.…

Although the Elementary and Secondary Education Act Title I and Individuals with Disabilities Education Act are designed to help public schools, concerns were raised during 1997 congressional hearings about whether public charter schools receive their proper share of these funds. This report examines how selected states allocate Title I and IDEA…

This report is the result of a nine-month, national study of nontraditional funding and financing of facilities for charter and other public schools. The qualitative research in this report, based on fourteen study states and the District of Columbia, describes the growing range of private involvement in the acquisition, construction, and…

"The 2007 Legislative Briefing" is a topical summary of actions during the 2006 legislative sessions that affect education in the 16 SREB states. Topics include state budgets and the economy, tax and revenue, school finance, teacher compensation, licensure, certification and evaluation of teachers, strengthening elementary and secondary…

The United States Census Bureau conducts an Annual Survey of Government Finances as authorized by law under Title 13, United States Code, Section 182. The 2006 survey, similar to other annual surveys and censuses of governments conducted for many years, covers the entire range of government finance activities--revenue, expenditure, debt, and…

This report, the Center on Education Policy's (CEP's) third annual review of Maryland's efforts to restructure schools under the No Child Left Behind Act, finds that (1) although between school years 2006-07 and 2007-08 the number of schools in the restructuring implementation phase declined slightly, there was a drastic increase in the number of…

Education funding today is a mess, and a solution is needed that addresses its biggest problems: most disadvantaged students do not receive the funding they need; red tape and overhead waste time and money; and new types of education options, like charter schools, are starved for dollars. Unfortunately, until now, so-called solutions have…