In an election year dominated by the pitched battle for Congress and major governors' races, state ballot measures involving education are largely tied to a similar theme: the burden of funding K-12 programs when state finances are shaky. In some cases, initiatives, constitutional amendments, and other ballot measures seek to tap new sources of…

Over the past few decades, a handful of states have chosen to provide state financing of special education programs through a method referred to as "Census-Based" funding--an approach which involves allocated block-grant funding on an assumed basis of uniform distribution of children with disabilities across school districts. The…

In 2009, California state legislators freed local educators from the specific guidelines that previously regulated spending on 40 categorical-aid programs known as Tier 3 programs. This Tier 3 flexibility reform, which deregulates $4.5 billion in education funding, was enacted at the same time the legislature made cuts in education spending in…

This report from the Study of School-Level Expenditures presents findings on how state and local education expenditures at the school level vary within school districts. This study is not examining compliance with the current Title I comparability requirement, nor does it examine the comparability of resources between districts. Rather, it focuses…

For the first time since its 1998 expansion to include religious schools, enrollment in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) did not grow in the 2010-2011 school year. Currently, 20,996 private school students receive taxpayer-funded tuition vouchers (of $6,442 per pupil), a decrease of 66 students over last year. Chart 1 shows program…

Undergraduate education is a highly profitable business for nonprofit colleges and universities. They do not show profits on their books, but instead take their profits in the form of spending on some combination of research, graduate education, low-demand majors, low faculty teaching loads, excess compensation, and featherbedding. The industry's…

In this paper the authors do not examine different operating strategies for charter schools or analyze the impact of their often educationally intensive models on finance. Instead, because public charter schools are funded predominantly by public dollars, they simply ask what impact location--and its associated variances in public funding and the…

This issue of "Legislative Review" takes a look at the news in higher education from April 11 to 15, 2011. This Legislative Review reports that: (1) Now in the final stages of the 2011 Legislative Session, House and Senate conference committees are working to reconcile versions of key bills approved by each chamber. These bills are: (a)…

In December 2010, the California Postsecondary Education Commission (CPEC) staff surveyed public universities in other states to learn how they have dealt with cuts in state funding. All of the institutions CPEC surveyed have increased tuition and or fees at least once in the last two fiscal years, and many project additional increases. All have…

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between public HEI's fiscal resources and student persistence to degree completion. Consequently, building upon the studies of researchers such as Titus (2006a, 2006b), Hearn (2003a, 2003b), and Winston (1999), this study investigates the relationships between institutional organizations…

This dissertation is a qualitative study on the decision-making of administrators within California's Beginning Teacher Support and Assessment (BTSA) teacher induction program. The study focuses on examining how declining resources act as a pressure, how well-established research on cutback management predict the behaviors of the BTSA…

This paper presents an analysis of trends in actual full-time equivalent (FTE) university staff over 2000-2010 for Go8 and non-Go8 universities. Staff are classified by function as "Academic" or "Other". Academic staff are classified as Research Only (RO) or Teaching and Research (T&R) or Teaching Only (TO). The evidence…

This article reports the reactions of twenty-seven professors now teaching in community college leadership programs who responded to the question, "What issues do you emphasize in your courses and what issues most concern your students/practitioners?" It also draws on a separate survey of forty-seven state directors and on the writings of four…

In some ways, there is a season of change at the national level in early childhood. Some things are wrapping up while some developments aim to prepare the "field" for improvements in the next year and beyond, just as a garden plot is readied for the next planting season. Change is in the air, and there's hope of renewal, but what changes and how…

The paper has a twofold structure and focus. The first part is an examination of the funding challenges facing African universities resulting mainly from public finance difficulties, and the second part is a case study of how some Kenyan and South African public universities have attempted to mitigate resource dependence difficulties through…