School Funding System Research Articles

The Roots of Inequality: Texas School Politics and the Leadup to Rodriguez

AbstractContrary to Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell’s majority opinion in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez (1973), Texas’s school finance system was the result of years of legislation and state-building that gave some areas the resources and capacity to provide more educational opportunities than others. As this article demonstrates, during the century leading up to the Rodriguez decision, Texas political leaders developed a public school funding system reliant on the highly unequal spatial distribution of property wealth across rural/urban, class, and racial lines. There was nothing inevitable about this. In fact, the history of Texas’s system reveals four pivotal eras when the state’s White leaders created and maintained a school finance system reliant on local property taxes and defined by rural/urban and racial differences that cemented deep inequalities. This case study traces those changes over time and brings part of the story to life through the example of Kirbyville, Texas, and its struggle to finance a new White high school. Returning to the historical roots of school financing in Texas reveals how rural/urban, racial, and wealth inequalities have been foundational to Texas’s public school finance system.

The Effect of Extra School Funding on Students’ Academic Achievements under a Centralized School Financing System

Abstract This paper analyzes the effect of providing extra school funding on student achievement under the homogenous school funding system in South Korea. This study exploits an administrative cutoff rule that determines the provision of school funding and uses a regression discontinuity design to identify a causal impact of extra school funding. The analysis finds that a 20 percent increase in per pupil funding for underperforming schools reduced the number of below-average students in mathematics, English, social studies, and science by 19.7 percent, 17.0 percent, 16.1 percent, and 18.1 percent compared with the control-side means. The research findings suggest that additional funding for underperforming schools to promote vertical equity would improve students’ academic outcomes if it is distributed directly to underperforming schools and used to provide new academic programs to students.

The influence of school principals as potential entrepreneurial leaders on the emergence of entrepreneurial activities for school funding

The South African Department of Basic Education introduced school funding regulations to ensure that all learners will have access to quality education. However, the dynamic, complex, turbulent and competitive macroenvironmental conditions, which have resulted in decreased public finances being available, will have a negative impact on the already burdened school funding system. This study explored the role of school principals as entrepreneurial leaders who influence the emergence of entrepreneurial activities for the purpose of school funding. This article explores school principals’ entrepreneurial leadership characteristics and entrepreneurial activities and the outcomes thereof. The qualitative findings of 9 interviews conducted with school principals show that these individuals possess the necessary entrepreneurial know-how and, in their leadership roles, they have the personal, and managerial skills required to identify and exploit entrepreneurial opportunities. The study found that the entrepreneurial activities introduced by the school principals comprised internal resource mobilisation through learner-led and management-led projects, and external mobilisation through partnerships with the private sector and former learners. Overall, the entrepreneurial activities contributed positively to the schools’ finances and improved learners’ entrepreneurial skills. The article concludes by making certain recommendations for various stakeholders.

Why don’t we have enough teachers?: A reconsideration of the available evidence

ABSTRACT There is widespread concern about the shortage of secondary school teachers in England. Recruitment to initial teacher training regularly fails to meet its intake targets. The secondary school pupil population is increasing. Teacher vacancies have risen, and more teachers are reportedly leaving the profession prematurely. Despite considerable investment in a wide range of initiatives, costing millions of pounds, the government has acknowledged that it has been unable improve the situation substantially. This paper presents time-series analyses of official data and documentary analyses of government publications. These suggest that teacher shortages are partly created by government policies themselves - including flaws in the selection system, and school funding system, the official extension of the education and training leaving age, and increases in the number of small schools. It is difficult when planning for teacher supply to anticipate the impact of such varied policy changes years ahead. Consequently, estimations of the numbers needed to be trained are hardly ever accurate. This paper suggests a reconsideration of the current selection processes for initial teacher training, independent review of the Teacher Supply Model, and a long-term approach to teacher supply planning, considering other policy changes in a more coordinated way.

School voucher funding system of post-Soviet Georgia: From lack of funding to lack of deliverables

ABSTRACTThis research explores the school funding system in post-Soviet Georgia. The research aimed to answer the following research questions:(1) Does the voucher system promote cost effectiveness, and does increased funding improve the academic achievements of schools?(2) To what extent does the school voucher funding system promote freedom of school choice?(3) How effective is the school funding system in promoting the privatization of general education?(3) The content analysis research method was used in the study. The study revealed important problems in the general education funding system of post-Soviet Georgia in terms of cost effectiveness, school choice, and the development of the private school sector. The authors argue that the absence of linkages between funding and educational reform is the main challenge facing the education system. The introduction of a differentiated, need-based, top-up funding model for private schools could improve opportunities for school choice and promote the establishment of free schools.

Mind the Gap: 20 Years of Progress and Retrenchment in School Funding and Achievement Gaps

AbstractAlthough there has been significant progress in the long term, achievement gaps among the nation's students persist. Many factors have contributed to the disparities in outcomes, and societal changes can explain progress, or lack thereof, over the past few decades. This is well documented in the 2010 Educational Testing Service (ETS) report Black–White Achievement Gaps: When Progress Stopped, which explored achievement gap trends and identified the changing conditions that may have influenced those trends. In this report, we extend that work by focusing on the relationship between school funding, resource allocation, and achievement among students from low‐income families. We tackle the assumption that greater resources, delivered through fair and equitable school funding systems, could help raise academic outcomes and reduce the achievement gap. The goal is to provide convincing evidence that state finance policies have consequences in terms of the level and distribution of resources, here limited to staffing characteristics, and that the resulting allocation of resources is also associated with changes in both the level of academic achievement and achievement gaps between low‐income children and their peers. Using more than 20 years of revenue and expenditure data for schools, we empirically test the idea that increasing investments in schools generally is associated with greater access to resources as measured by staffing ratios, class sizes, and the competitiveness of teacher wages. When the findings presented here are considered with the strong body of academic literature on the positive relationship between substantive and sustained state school finance reforms and improved student outcomes, a strong case can be made that state and federal policy focused on improving state finance systems to ensure equitable funding and improving access to resources for children from low‐income families is a key strategy to improve outcomes and close achievement gaps.

California’s first year with local control finance and accountability

In 2013, Governor Jerry Brown and the California legislature radically restructured the state’s school funding system and accountability systems with a weighted student formula and a mandated local planning process in each district. The new law substitutes local politics and grassroots agency for state-driven mandates and compliance reviews. While the Local Control Funding Formula has had immediate impact, early evaluations suggest that districts like the new system and are earnest in their implementation efforts, but it will take years to assess the effect of the multi-indicator Local Control Accountability Plans. Simultaneously, the state is implementing the Common Core State Standards and the associated Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium tests, which make creating local accountability plans more complicated.

Michigan and Ohio K–12 Educational Financing Systems: Equality and Efficiency

We consider issues of equality and efficiency in two different school funding systems—a state-level system in Michigan and a foundation system in Ohio. Unlike Ohio, the Michigan system restricts districts from generating property or income tax revenue to fund operating expenditures. In both states, districts fund capital expenditures with local tax revenue. Our results indicate that although average revenue and expenditures per pupil in Michigan and Ohio are almost identical, the distributions of the various revenue sources are quite different. Ohio’s funding system has greater equality in terms of total revenue, largely due to Ohio redistributing state funds to the least wealthy districts while Michigan does not. We find relatively wealthy Michigan districts spend more on capital expenditures, whereas relatively wealthy Ohio districts spend more on labor and materials. This suggests that constraints on raising local revenue to fund operating expenditures in Michigan could create efficiency issues.

Evaluating the recession’s impact on state school finance systems

The Great Recession’s effect on state school finance systems was unlike previous downturns in the early 1990s and early 2000s in that it a) involved a greater loss of taxable income in many states, thus greater loss to state general fund revenues, b) also involved a substantial collapse of housing markets and related reduction or at least leveling of growth of taxable property wealth, c) but also involved a substantive infusion of federal “fiscal stabilization” aid to be used to fill holes in state general aid formulas. The goal of this study is to evaluate the effects of the recession on equity of state school funding systems with respect to child poverty concentrations. Using school district level panel data from 1993 to 2011, we evaluate the interplay between local, state and federal source revenues through the course of the recent recession by comparison with the less severe economic downturn of the early 2000s. Then using state level estimates of elasticities between revenue and spending measures and district poverty rates, we estimate whether changes in the distribution of state, local or federal revenue contribute most to changes in overall equity of current spending and whether those contributions changed during the recent recession.

It takes a Federalist Village: A Revitalized Property Tax as the Linchpin for Stable, Effective K-12 Public Education Funding

Undeniable intra-state, inter-district disparities in funding public K-12 education were not explicitly litigated in the federal courts prior to San Antonio v. Rodriguez. The plaintiffs’ attorneys in the Brown cases were quite strategic in presenting the case against the Topeka School Board as lead case; the Topeka public school facility was structurally equal to public schools attended by Linda Brown’s white counterparts. With funding inequities unavailable as an issue, The United States Supreme Court unequivocally declared in that case that “segregated schools are inherently unequal.” It was not until 1973 that disparate funding was addressed directly by the Court. In San Antonio v. Rodriguez, the last federal case explicitly challenging the constitutionality of funding disparities driven by principle reliance on the ad valorem property tax, the Court held that a school-financing system based on local property taxes was not an unconstitutional violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause. Though the funding disparities between the two school Texas districts were stark, the plaintiffs in that case unsuccessfully argued that education is a fundamental right under the US Constitution and that a school funding system predicated upon local property taxes that impacted lower income groups created a suspect classification subject to strict scrutiny there under. From that point forward, state supreme courts became the fora in which such questions were litigated with both notable successes and equally notable failures. Whatever the litigation outcome, (and predicated on language in state constitutions that almost without exception guaranteed a public education to state residents) observable state level changes in the allocation of responsibility for funding public education have followed in Rodriguez’s wake. From heavy reliance by local school districts on local property taxes for funding, increasing state participation in financial support for public education opened state tills funded primarily through retail sales taxes and state individual taxes. In so doing, funding from property tax revenues that had proven relatively stable though inadequate because of great variations in the value of underlying tax rolls, was supplemented and in at least one instance replaced by state funding (Hawaii). This more explicitly shared responsibility has had mixed results; state funding has resulted in increased support during periods of general economic expansion but has declined during recessionary periods. Recent data show a general national pattern of reduced state support dating from the inception of the recession of 2008. In short, increased funding has proven unstable because of the greater comparative revenue elasticity of state revenue sources vis-a-vis that of the property tax. Funding for public education must be stabilized. Because public education is such a huge undertaking, all levels of government must play a role in achieving that financial stability. As such, policymakers must be aware of the differences between property taxes, state retail sales taxes, and state income taxes as funding sources and should develop funding packages that take the best financial advantage of each source. This essay briefly summarizes the differences between these revenue sources, highlighting factors that presently affect revenue capacity. I explore ways in which to better craft funding packages with particular attention to the local and state roles in this effort. I argue that a key element will be an effectively revitalized property tax, immunized from a wide array of constraints originating at the state level that have compromised its potential for revenue productivity. I argue that the state role is twofold: (1) enacting legislation protective of property tax revenues as a critical element of funding and (2) allocating from state general revenues, support critical to achieving adequate and equitable education. An important part of the discussion of the state role is an examination of the pitfalls of earmarking revenues such as gaming proceeds for public education. I warn against such reliance. Finally, I distinguish between indirect and direct support provided by the federal government for public education. I argue that indirect federal support for public education can be increased by enacting a credit for property taxes paid to support public education along with a credit for charitable contributions made to support foundations serving poorer public schools. I note that the limited direct federal support provided to public schools has been earmarked for designated purposes and is likely to remain both limited and earmarked.

The school funding system and its discriminatory impact on marginalised learners

South Africa in reality harbours two separate education systems in its public school domain: one consisting of the former white schools, which is adequately resourced, and the other constituting the township and rural schools entrenched in abject poverty. The current school funding system perpetuates this state of inequality

‘Unhelpfully Complex and Exceedingly Opaque’: Australia's School Funding System

Australia's system of school funding is notoriously complex and difficult to understand. This article shines some light on this issue by describing clearly the processes of school funding that currently exist in Australia. It describes the steps taken by federal and state governments to provide over $30 billion each year to government and non-government schools. The article argues that more can be done by both levels of government to implement a consistent and transparent allocation process. Greater consistency and transparency in this area would improve efficiency (by understanding better the impact of school resources on student outcomes) and equity (by understanding better the level of real need in individual schools, and funding appropriately). As such, it is a worthwhile goal.

Situating Texas School Finance Policy in a CRT Framework: How “Substantially Equal” Yields Racial Inequity

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to conduct a critical race policy analysis of Texas school finance policy. This empirical article examines three chapters of the Texas education code (TEC) and identifies the racial effects that the school funding system has on seven majority-Mexican American school districts. Methodology: Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Latina/o Critical (LatCrit) theoretical frameworks are employed in this article in which race and property are highlighted as concepts central to the analysis. The methodology allows for a critical perspective on history and the racial effects of policy to be outlined. First, a historical analysis of race and racism, schooling, and politics in Texas contextualizes the debate over school finance equity. Second, an analysis of the effects that the school finance system has on communities of color is completed. Analysis and Findings: An examination of primarily 2002—2003 school finance data, Texas Supreme Court opinions, and TEC indicates that majority-Mexican American school districts are disadvantaged by Texas school finance policy. Whether it is operational, maintenance, or facilities funding, the school finance system institutes inequity.

A 60 million dollar statistical issue arising in the interpretation and calculation of a measure of relative disparity: Zuni Public School District 89 v. U.S. Department of Education

In 1994, the U.S. Congress rewrote the statute providing educational funds to towns and cities of the nation where the federal government owns substantial amounts of land, which cannot be taxed locally. Usually, this impact aid goes to the local school districts; however, if a state has a program for subsidizing education in all areas so that the ‘per-pupil’ expenditures are approximately equal throughout the state, then the state receives a large share of the federal funds. The previous statute authorized the Department of Education (DOE) to establish a formula for determining whether a state’s educational funding was ‘equalized’. The new law specifies its own formula. Both formulas place an upper limit on a percentile-based measure of disparity calculated from the data on average per-pupil expenditures in the local educational areas of the state. While the formulas are similar, they describe the percentiles to be used in the calculation differently. In 1996, when the DOE published its regulations for administering the new law, it interpreted the new formula for assessing whether the educational funding in a state was ‘equal’ to mean the identical calculation it had previously issued. In 1999, the state of New Mexico claimed that its school funding system met the criterion for ‘equalization’, so it deserved 75% of the federal impact funds allocated to all impacted school districts in the state. Two local districts filed suit claiming that the state’s funding did not meet the new statute’s criterion for being equalized, so the entire federal payment should go to the affected school districts. This article describes the calculation most statisticians would make after reading the new law. It will be seen that none of the calculations presented by the parties is technically correct. Furthermore, one of the assertions made by the DOE and accepted by the majority in a split appellate opinion is not mathematically correct. An en banc opinion of all 12 circuit judges split on the interpretation of the statute and the U.S. Supreme Court has accepted the case for review. The last section suggests that alternative disparity measures based on the data on expenditures in schools rather than districts would give a more accurate indication of the disparity in school funding in a state. Under either interpretation of the current law, a disparity in educational funding that courts previously have found to support a claim of racial segregation or discrimination can satisfy the criteria for equal educational funding.

Leveling the Playing Field: Creating Funding Equity through Student-Based Budgeting

When the Cincinnati Public Schools devised a reform strategy for improving student performance, it became clear that the district's traditional budgeting system was inadequate. The authors trace the district's process of moving to a system of student-based budgeting: funding children rather than staff members and weighting the funding according to schools' and students' needs. THE INCREASING local and national focus on accountability has districts and states scrambling to develop ways to hold all schools to the same high standards. But demanding equivalent achievement levels across all of a district's schools makes no sense if the financial resources are unevenly allocated and the schools aren't given the flexibility to use those resources in ways that address their own academic priorities and the particular needs of their students. Most discussion about funding has focused on differences in levels of funding between districts, and it is often assumed that funds are distributed evenly to schools within districts. But recent research highlights startling differences within districts, with some schools receiving as much as 60% more funding than others with similar categories and numbers of students.1 The role of the district in ensuring a high-quality education for all students is the principal focus of School Communities That Work: A National Task Force on the Future of Urban Districts.2 This article was prepared in conjunction with the Task Force's efforts to understand, support, and develop the work of urban education systems that are seeking to level the educational playing field for all students in their jurisdictions. Seeking Resource Equity Redistributing resources within a district can be a painful and controversial task and can result in the loss of cherished programs and staff. But the equitable distribution of funds creates the basis for real equality of opportunity for all students, and the process of creating such can bring a district to a much clearer sense of purpose and strategy. The Cincinnati Public Schools (CPS) discovered the payoff -- and the pain -- when the district overhauled its inequitable school funding system in the midst of implementing an ambitious, long-range reform strategy that focused on accountability. Between 1998 and 2001, the district made the transition to a student-based budgeting formula that eliminated dramatic variation in funding levels between schools within the system. Beginning in 2002-03, the only differences in school funding were to be those driven by student need. Cincinnati's process highlights the need for widespread community support and bold leadership from the administration and the school board. It also helps to clarify the idea of resource equity and its connection to other critical elements of a districtwide strategy for improving student performance. In this article, we use the CPS experience with student-based budgeting to show how funding and flexibility are inextricably linked to accountability and excellence. Then we focus on the reasons some schools get more than others, not only in Cincinnati but in most school districts. We show how CPS used student-based budgeting to distribute dollars more fairly and to create more flexibility in their use. Finally, we include a set of questions to ask in your own districts and states. Students First: Cincinnati's Reform Strategy Begun by Superintendent Michael Brandt and continued under the leadership of Superintendent Steven Adamowski, Cincinnati's strategic school reform plan, known as Students First, has been implemented over the past five years with the involvement of the entire community. A moral imperative for more equitable funding between schools and for more school-level flexibility in the use of funds gradually emerged from the interaction of the plan's four components: * Establish standards for student performance. …

It's Time to Start the Slow School Movement

food movement began as a protest against global proliferation of McDonald's restaurants. Mr. Holt calls for a similar backlash against today's hamburger approach toward education, which emphasizes uniformity, predictability, and measurability of processes and results. WHEN THE YOUNG Cole Porter left his elementary school in Indiana for a prep school on East Coast, his mother gave his age as 12, although he was in fact two years older. She had always encouraged his musical gifts and evidently decided that two more years at home, practicing piano and entertaining passengers on passing riverboats, was a better way of fostering his songwriting abilities.1 We should all be grateful for her foresight. In today's school climate, Kate Porter's deception appears both unlikely and unwise. pressure to proceed from one targeted standard to another as fast as possible, to absorb and demonstrate specified knowledge with conveyor-belt precision, is an irresistible fact of school life. Parents are encouraged to focus on achievement, not self- realization. A present-day Porter would soon be labeled a nerdy slow learner if he flunked math test and preferred keyboard to a baseball bat. It's curious that, in an age when right of adults to shape their own lifestyle is taken for granted, right of children to an education that will help them make something of themselves is more circumscribed than ever. This curriculum straitjacket is price exacted for believing that education is about assessed performance on specified content. march toward ruthless conformity began in 1970s, as Cold Warriors blamed schools for supposed deficiencies in American technology. It gained momentum in 1980s, when, as Arthur Levine has noted, generation born after World War II became young urban professionals, and the education of their children became baby boomers' and nation's preoccupation.2 1983 Reagan-era report A Nation at Risk set agenda for all that has followed. Influenced on one hand by idea that education is an atomistic, science-like activity, and on other by output-led simplicities of supply-side economics, schools in America have been in grip of some form of standards- based reform for nearly 20 years. current Administration of George W. Bush has pushed through idea of universal standards-based tests to be given each year in grades 3 through 8, a requirement that undermines independence of states and is widely thought to be unworkable. History may show, as is so often case, that this ultimate adornment to edifice of standards may mark very moment when its foundations begin to crumble. 33rd Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll shows a rising trend in favor of school-based assessment and of public schooling in general.3 results of state testing in English and mathematics, far from offering new insights, merely confirm that chief determinants of performance are parental income and level of school resources -- in short, affluence of neighborhood. Conservative columnist George Will puts it more brutally: The crucial predictor of a school's performance is of children's families.4 But this is not a law of nature: it reflects tendencies of tests to reflect culturally embedded concepts of student quality and of school funding systems to offer least to those who need most. To excel in high-stakes tests, even schools in sleek suburbs are prepared to distort their curriculum, as Billie Stanton observes in a revealing report on effects of standards-led reform in Colorado: Even parents in an affluent Boulder neighborhood . . . are questioning whether private school may not be preferable, since watching their fourth-graders return home dazed and drained from being drilled again and again in how to write a 'power paragraph. …

The courts and school finance reform

judicial question (p. 290). School finance reform certainly has given credence to this observation. Most major school finance reform efforts across the states have been precipitated by or accompanied by litigation. Since 1970 all but eight states have experienced school finance litigation, and about half of the states have suits currently active. And where school funding systems have been judicially invalidated, states have often remained in litigation for well over a decade. This article reviews school finance litigation since the early 1970s. The concluding section offers some observations regarding trends and issues as well as the judicial role in school finance reform during the remainder of the 1990s.