School districts have increasingly adopted weighted student funding (WSF) formulas that allocate dollars, rather than staff positions, to schools in the name of equity and flexibility. While research to date has studied equity in some of these districts, there is no research that examines the entire cohort of WSF districts together. This paper…

School districts have increasingly adopted weighted student funding (WSF) formulas that allocate dollars, rather than staff positions, to schools in the name of equity and flexibility. While research to date has studied equity in some of these districts, there is no research that examines the entire cohort of WSF districts together. This paper…

The right to education depends upon a willingness to finance education fairly. Addressing the difference in educational achievement between learners of different backgrounds is a key aspect of fairness. Framed by contemporary neoliberal policies around marketisation and competitiveness, this paper examines fairness in the education finance policy…

Measures of student disadvantage--or risk--are critical components of equity-focused education policies. However, the risk measures used in contemporary policies have significant limitations, and despite continued advances in data infrastructure and analytic capacity, there has been little innovation in these measures for decades. We develop a new…

Comparisons with other parts of the United Kingdom have played an important role in justifying decisions made in relation to student funding in Scotland since devolution. This article considers first what comparative claims have been made for the content of student funding policy in four areas: fees, debt, total living cost support and…

In this dissertation, I address the issue of social inequalities in education and the role of the education system in confronting them. The project involves two main parts, one empirical and the other conceptual. In the first part--chapters 1 and 2--I address the practical dimension of how to reduce social inequalities in education by exploring…

The purpose of this study was to compare the foundation allocation and three special allocations for special-needs students, ESL students, and students with low socioeconomic status in Ontario, Alberta, and British Columbia to see what these special allocations look like as vertical equity measures. Because stronger measures are needed if…

While there is a wealth of research on school finance equity and adequacy, and school finance theory clearly documents differences between the two concepts, no study has examined whether the reforms engendered by each approach actually differ in terms of resource distribution. The present study examines the issues using district-level data on…

This article examines recent trends in the allocation of education dollars across school districts, investigating in particular the impact of federal dollars on school funding disparities. Using both the coefficient of variation and the range ratio to evaluate spending disparities, this article estimates that over the 1990s, funding disparities…