Toward a Consensus Approach to Evaluating State School Finance Systems! (and dumping the others!)
Over the past decade, there has been an emerging consensus regarding state school finance systems, money and schools. That consensus is supported by a growing body of high-quality empirical research regarding the importance of equitable and adequate financing for providing quality schooling to all children. As guideposts for this new and improved annual report on state school finance systems, we offer the following five core principles:
- The level and distribution of school funding matters;
- Achieve higher outcomes and a broader array of outcomes often requires additional resources and may require substantial additional resources;
- Achieving competitive student outcomes depends on adequate school resources, including a competitively compensated teacher workforce;
- Closing achievement gaps between children from rich and poor neighborhoods requires progressive distribution of resources targeted toward children with greater educational needs;
- Both the adequacy of students’ outcomes and improving the equity of those outcomes are in our national interest.
But US public schooling remains primarily in the hands of states. On average, about 90 percent of funding for local public school systems and charter schools comes from state and local tax sources. How state and local revenue is raised and distributed is a function of seemingly complicated calculations usually adopted as legislation and often with the goal of achieving more equitable and adequate public schooling for the state’s children.
Core Principles of Funding Fairness
Beginning in 2010, in collaboration with the Education Law Center of New Jersey, we laid out a methodology and series of indicators for comparing state school finance systems using available national data sets. With support from the William T. Grant Foundation, we dramatically expanded our analyses and developed publicly accessible district and state level databases – The School Funding Fairness Data System. More recently, we have combined our data with those of the Stanford Education Data Archive to estimate a National Education Cost Model. Concurrently, we have begun to expand our state funding equity analyses to include public two- Continue reading: Toward a Consensus Approach to Evaluating State School Finance Systems! (and dumping the others!) – School Finance 101