School districts across New York are constrained from fully exploiting a potential source of revenue to help offset pressure on local taxes. The revenue source in question is commercial advertising--including signs, sponsorships and facility naming rights, especially for athletic facilities. Experience in other states suggests New York school…

A four-day school week (4dsw) is becoming more common, especially in areas across the western United States. States with large rural areas are spearheading this change. For example, Colorado, Idaho, Missouri, Montana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and South Dakota have more than 500 districts using a 4dsw. The transition to the 4dsw and the debate over…

Opponents of educational choice recycle the same false prophesies of doom without regard to the evidence or the size and scope of the proposals. Part I of this report assesses the validity of choice opponents' predictions that choice policies will lead to significant losses of district school funding and declining academic performance. Part II of…

This article takes advantage of a recently released national data set on school site expenditures to evaluate spending variations between traditional district operated schools and charter schools operated by for-profit versus nonprofit management firms. Prior research has revealed the revenue-enhancement, private fund-raising capacity of major…

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 four-day school week (4dsw) is growing in popularity, especially in rural areas across the western United States. RAND Corporation researchers addressed knowledge gaps about the 4dsw by conducting a large-scale study of the implementation and outcomes of the 4dsw that involved the collection of original data in numerous districts across Idaho,…

From funding to teacher quality, inequities exist between school districts. This paper adds to the literature on inequities by examining the impact of pension plan formulas on pension benefits. Using data from the salary schedules of 464 Missouri school districts, this paper analyzes how various final average salary calculations would impact the…

Background/Context: The problems that school district leaders identify and how they frame them have consequences--for both policy implementation and the ways that teachers respond. Although that is likely true in all community contexts (from rural to urban, inside and outside metropolitan centers), the influence of broader discourses associated…

When pension benefits are not directly tied to contributions, some individuals may earn disproportionate returns on their retirement contributions. For instance, individuals who receive relatively larger late-career raises will receive disproportionately greater returns. For teachers, whose salaries are determined by salary schedules set by…

Across the country, districts are choosing to #GoOpen and transitioning to the use of openly licensed educational resources to improve student learning in their schools. Openly licensed educational resources enable districts to reallocate significant funds currently spent on inflexible, static learning materials to resources and activities that…

This product development report addresses the components for an operations manual, which will serve as a guide for school districts pursuing or implementing a four-day school week. The product will provide school districts with a resource to address their needs, questions, and concerns around all aspects of the transition to a four-day school…

For years, the St. Louis school district has experienced the convergence of two trend lines school superintendents hope never to see: rising employee-pension costs and falling student enrollment. Despite years of fully funding its share of the teacher-pension plan, the proportion of the St. Louis district's budget tied up in paying benefits for…

Since the Coleman Report in 1966, researchers have been analyzing educational resource inputs with respect to district, school, and student level outputs. There has been an increase in federal and state control of local school districts, as demonstrated in the adoption of the Common Core Standards and mandatory national and state assessments. In…

In the education world, the existence of funding inequities has long been a known fact, but the sources of these inequities have not always been obvious. Typically, local property tax variation has been blamed as the sole, or at least primary, cause of inequalities and called for greater state funding as the solution. In practice, however, it is…

This article makes the case that cost functions are the best available methodology for ensuring consistency between a state's educational accountability system and its education finance system. Because they are based on historical data and well-known statistical methods, cost functions are a particularly flexible and low-cost way to forecast what…