The federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) entitles students with disabilities to a free appropriate public education. Students with disabilities often require additional support to enable them to achieve academic and functional goals relative to their nondisabled peers. These legally protected supports and services all add up…

Policy and funding influence equitable education for students who are gifted. The concept of equity is examined through variations in policy and in funding at the state, district, and local levels. Challenges and barriers to equity in policy and funding include policy structures, where policy provides guidance without accountability measures, or…

Federal, state, and local initiatives have encouraged education and training providers to build stackable credentials, a series of postsecondary credentials that can be earned over time and that build on each other to prepare individuals for different needs for knowledge and skills throughout a career. By offering flexible pathways that allow…

In 2012, Governor Kasich instituted a call-to-action, "Campus leaders throughout Ohio must work together to rethink how the state allocates its investment in our public higher educational facilities." (Ohio Higher Education Capital Funding Commission, 2016). The intent of Governor Kasich was to drive more equitable outcomes and…

College students, staff, and faculty all across the country are demanding greater racial and socioeconomic justice in higher education, where longstanding inequities create barriers for students who are Black, Latino, or from low-income backgrounds to earn a postsecondary degree. In response, policymakers and higher education leaders have made…

Ever since the first charter school opened in Minnesota in 1992, the battle for fair funding has raged across the land. Advocates of charters--independently run, nonprofit public schools--have pressed hard to eliminate the massive disparities in the funding that charter students receive when compared with their district-operated peers serving…

Performance funding policies allocate state appropriations to public institutions based in part on retention and completion outcomes, and equity metrics allocate additional funding for graduating historically underserved students. Through interviews of 52 college administrators and state policymakers, I explore campus responses to performance…

This paper explores what happens to similar groups of children educated in different school districts. In this case, the "twins" in the study are groups of students who live in the same state in similar geographies and who share certain demographic characteristics. For this report, "twin districts" have very similar sizes and…

Of the many inequities in the education system, gaps in access to strong teaching have proven to be among the most stubborn. That is not to say that there are not excellent teachers in high-poverty schools. Research shows an indisputable and wide-spread pattern in schools and districts across the country: Low-income children and children of color…

This report calls upon Michigan's state leaders to quickly develop and implement solution-based approaches to both support the long-term recovery of student learning, as well as address the longstanding inequities and underperformance that have plagued Michigan's education system for decades. Building upon last year's recommendations, which called…

Computers are now a ubiquitous part of US elementary school education. With policy reports suggesting that inequities in information and communication technology (ICT) access across US schools are a thing of the past, investigating how such resources and their use may nonetheless continue to vary becomes all that much more important. Through a…

A full year of progress in advancing education reform across America is documented in each of the Foundation for Excellence in Education's Annual Reports. The illustrated pages of the 2014 report, provide data-rich updates on Excellence in Education's work to advance student-centered policies in more than 40 states, all aimed at improving learning…

The purpose of this research was to determine the relationship between distribution of teacher resources and student need. The effort was to determine if the "best" teachers are teaching the "neediest" students in the elementary schools in the "Big 8" urban school districts in Ohio as equity principles would mandate.…

The newly released Thomas B. Fordham Institute report "Fund the Child: Bringing Equity, Autonomy and Portability to Ohio School Finance," is the latest in a series of reports promoting the implementation of decentralized governance of public schooling coupled with student-based allocation of revenues to schools. While the current report…

Over the last three decades 45 states have been confronted with school finance lawsuits. This phenomenon has led to a proliferation of school funding equity studies. However, to date, most studies of the equity of state school finance systems have focused on differences in expenditures between school districts. More recent research has found…