Inequalities in Public School District Revenues

Inequalities in Public School District Revenues
Author: Thomas Parrish
Publisher: Department of Education Office of Educational
Total Pages: 0
Release: 1998
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9780160496523

This report examines variations between school districts and across the states in the quantities of the various types of revenues received for educational programs and services. It builds on some of the analysis techniques introduced in an earlier National Center for Education Statistics publication, "Disparities in Public School Spending" (1995). While that report focused primarily on public school expenditures for the 1989-90 school year, this report provides detailed information about how much money is received through alternative funding sources at the federal, state, and local levels for different types of students, districts, and communities for the 1991-92 school year. Many of these funding sources are categorical in nature, that is, generated for specific reasons or designated for specific purposes. The revenue measures are matched to important school district characteristics such as the percentage of children in poverty, the percentage of minority children, and wealth. Data come from the 1992 Survey of Local Government Finances and other databases. The lowest poverty and lowest percent minority districts have substantially more actual general education revenues than their higher poverty and percent minority counterparts, but the opposite is true for categorical revenues. For Chapter 1 (renamed Title 1 in the 1994 reauthorization), revenues per target student are greatest in the lowest, as well as the highest, poverty districts. Comparable results are found for state counterparts. Overall, findings from this report illustrate the relative importance of concerns related to interstate, as well as intrastate, equity from the perspective of the child. Children in low equity, but high revenue states, such as New York and Vermont, appear to be much better off in terms of the quantities of educational services received than those in highly equitable, but relatively low revenue states like Kentucky. Implications are discussed. Five appendixes provide supplemental information for variables of interest, technical notes, and definitions of key terms. (Contains 41 figures, 73 tables, and 41 references.) (SLD)

Education and Income

Education and Income
Author: Patricia Cayo Sexton
Publisher: New York : Viking Press
Total Pages: 324
Release: 1961
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9780670001682

Inequality in Public School Spending Across Space and Time

Inequality in Public School Spending Across Space and Time
Author: Christopher Biolsi
Publisher:
Total Pages: 46
Release: 2021
Genre: Education
ISBN:

This paper takes a novel time series perspective on K-12 school spending. About half of school spending is financed by state government aid to local districts. Because state aid is generally income conditioned, with low-income districts receiving more aid, state aid acts as a mechanism for risk sharing between school districts. We show that temporal inequality, due to state and local business cycles, is prevalent across the income distribution. We estimate a model of local revenue and state aid, and its allocation across districts, and use the parameters to simulate impulse response functions. We find that state aid provides risk sharing for local shocks, although slow speed of adjustment results in temporal inequality. There is little risk sharing for statewide income shocks, and the risk from such shocks to school spending is more severe in low income districts because of their greater reliance on state aid.

Inequality and Education Funding

Inequality and Education Funding
Author: Calin Arcalean
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2010
Genre:
ISBN:

We investigate the relationship between inequality and education funding in a model of probabilistic voting over public education spending where the private option is available. A change in inequality can have opposite effects at different income levels: higher inequality decreases public spending per student and increases enrollment in public schools in poor economies, while the opposite holds in the rich ones. A change in the tax base can also have non-monotonic effects. We also study the implications of different voting participation across income groups. The predictions of the model are supported by U.S. school district-level data.

Educational Inequality and School Finance

Educational Inequality and School Finance
Author: Bruce D. Baker
Publisher: Harvard Education Press
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2021-02-09
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1682532445

In Educational Inequality and School Finance, Bruce D. Baker offers a comprehensive examination of how US public schools receive and spend money. Drawing on extensive longitudinal data and numerous studies of states and districts, he provides a vivid and dismaying portrait of the stagnation of state investment in public education and the continuing challenges of achieving equity and adequacy in school funding. Baker explores school finance, the school and classroom resources derived from school funding, and how and why those resources matter. He provides a critical examination of popular assumptions that undergird the policy discourse around school funding—notably, that money doesn’t matter and that we are spending more and getting less—and shows how these misunderstandings contribute to our reluctance to increase investment in education at a time when the demands on our educational system are rising. Through an introduction to the concepts of adequacy, equity, productivity, and efficiency, Baker shows how these can be used to evaluate policy reforms. He argues that we know a great deal about the role and importance of money in schools, the mechanisms through which money matters for student outcomes, and the trade-offs involved, and he presents a framework for designing and financing an equitable and adequate public education system, with balanced and stable sources of revenue. Educational Inequality and School Finance takes an issue all too often relegated to technical experts and makes it accessible for broader public empowerment and engagement.

Savage Inequalities

Savage Inequalities
Author: Jonathan Kozol
Publisher: Crown
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2012-07-24
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0770436668

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “An impassioned book, laced with anger and indignation, about how our public education system scorns so many of our children.”—The New York Times Book Review In 1988, Jonathan Kozol set off to spend time with children in the American public education system. For two years, he visited schools in neighborhoods across the country, from Illinois to Washington, D.C., and from New York to San Antonio. He spoke with teachers, principals, superintendents, and, most important, children. What he found was devastating. Not only were schools for rich and poor blatantly unequal, the gulf between the two extremes was widening—and it has widened since. The urban schools he visited were overcrowded and understaffed, and lacked the basic elements of learning—including books and, all too often, classrooms for the students. In Savage Inequalities, Kozol delivers a searing examination of the extremes of wealth and poverty and calls into question the reality of equal opportunity in our nation’s schools. Praise for Savage Inequalities “I was unprepared for the horror and shame I felt. . . . Savage Inequalities is a savage indictment. . . . Everyone should read this important book.”—Robert Wilson, USA Today “Kozol has written a book that must be read by anyone interested in education.”—Elizabeth Duff, Philadelphia Inquirer “The forces of equity have now been joined by a powerful voice. . . . Kozol has written a searing exposé of the extremes of wealth and poverty in America’s school system and the blighting effect on poor children, especially those in cities.”—Emily Mitchell, Time “Easily the most passionate, and certain to be the most passionately debated, book about American education in several years . . . A classic American muckraker with an eloquent prose style, Kozol offers . . . an old-fashioned brand of moral outrage that will affect every reader whose heart has not yet turned to stone.”—Entertainment Weekly