Amidst chronic disparities in per-student resources, how best to construct funding formulas to equitably fund colleges and universities is an enduring policy concern. This brief focuses on a historically overlooked financial mechanism, categorical funding, to examine its role in funding (in)equity. Leveraging illustrative data from four…

The State of the States in Gifted Education report is a biennial report that has been published by the Council of State Directors of Programs for the Gifted since 1985. The current study examines financial data from these reports relating to the funding of gifted and talented education (GATE) by state-level funding authorities descriptively. We…

Policymakers commonly assert that Broad Access Institutions (BAIs) cannot be "all things to all people" when cutting their funding. BAIs were founded with comprehensive missions to generate postsecondary access through low barriers for admission and affordable tuition and promote student-centeredness through institutional foci on…

The Trump administration may push for a shift away from the current formula-driven federal K-12 education funding toward more flexible block grants -- part of a broader effort to significantly scale back the U.S. Department of Education and direct more education policy decision-making to the states. If Congress authorizes this new flexibility,…

This article provides a review of prior empirical work exploring whether and to what extent school district racial composition affects the costs associated with providing equal educational opportunity to achieve a common set of outcomes. This prior work mainly involves education cost function modeling on several states and in an earlier version of…

The study underlying this new report, "Revisiting California's Invisible Achievement Gap," examined trends in the state's publicly available education data for school years 2014-15 through 2022-23, described 10 state-required local control and accountability plans (LCAPs) for school year 2022-23, and incorporated context for these…

In 2013, California enacted an ambitious school funding reform--the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF). The LCFF fundamentally overhauled the state's prior K-12 education finance system, which studies found to be inequitable, irrational, and highly centralized. More than a decade after its enactment, a growing body of research indicates the LCFF…

A well-intentioned bipartisan coalition came together in the late 20th century to spur improvement of the K-12 education system through test-based accountability and public school choice. The ability of this coalition to institute and maintain meaningful "accountability" proved extremely limited. State accountability systems morphed into…

California's education spending has risen substantially in the past decade, and much of the additional funding has gone toward teacher salaries and benefits. Lagging academic performance and disparate outcomes across demographic groups, however, have amplified concerns about teacher staffing. This report examines trends in teacher spending and…

This is the technical appendix for the report, "Teacher Staffing Trends in California: Assessing the Impact of Recent Spending," which examines recent trends in district staff spending, student-teacher ratios, and teacher credentials and experience, with an added focus on districts that received targeted funding for high-need students…

Purpose: Using the social ecological model as a guiding framework, the purpose of this study was to examine the status of physical education in Colorado. Method: A sequential explanatory mixed-method approach was employed to acquire a snapshot of the status of physical education. Participants completed an initial survey followed by semistructured…