How much private educational choice is "really" available to families in your state? To measure how much K-12 choice is available, we have created the EdChoice Friedman Index which evaluates three key factors: student eligibility--the percentage of children who can participate in taxpayer-funded private K-12 choice programs; flexible use…

Accountability efforts under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) has brought greater attention to school-level processes and practices and their impact on student outcomes. This has pushed states to report more school-level inputs, including per-pupil expenditures. Grounded in an open systems theory (OST) framework, we identify the association…

This research update from Research for Action's PACER project revisits and expands on prior analyses of fund balances across Pennsylvania's public education sectors using the most recent 2023-24 data. The findings show that cyber charter schools continue to grow per-pupil fund balances at a much faster rate than school districts or…

New Hampshire's Education Freedom Account (EFA) program is restricted to families that make no more than 350% of the federal poverty level. (That's $90,370 for a family of three and $112,525 for a family of four.) Republicans in the state Legislature have proposed removing the income cap and allowing all students to participate in the program.…

This documentation is for the Provisional File Version 1a of the School-Level Finance Survey (SLFS) for school year (SY) 2021-22, fiscal year 2022 (FY 22) conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). It contains a brief description of the data collection in conjunction with information required to understand and access the…

Spending per pupil by Wisconsin public schools has lagged inflation in recent years and fallen further behind the U.S. average. This is due to a series of policy choices, including a recent two-year freeze on state-imposed caps on school district revenues, that have also helped to hold down state and local taxes. In a related trend, the share of…

Career and technical education (CTE) has existed in the United States for over a century, and only in recent years have there been opportunities to assess the causal impact of participating in these programs while in high school. To date, no work has assessed whether the relative costs of these programs meet or exceed the benefits as described in…

In April 2024, the School Finance Indicators Database released new estimates of school district funding gaps, which refer to the difference between how much per-pupil funding each district "receives" and how much per-pupil funding each district "needs." Linking these estimates to Texas Education Agency (TEA) student achievement…

As of 2023, 44 states plus the District of Columbia provide schools with supplemental funding for their low-income students. Policymakers often want to understand how the "amount" of extra funding they provide for low-income students compares to other states. Because states use different methodologies to determine these amounts, previous…

I examine whether the impact of the Great Recession on school district spending, the allocation of resources, and student achievement varied depending on the strength of state's teachers' unions. Employing a diff-in-diff-in-diff identification strategy, I find that school districts in states with strong teachers' unions experienced significantly…

Four-day school week (4DSW) adoption is an increasingly popular policy, particularly for rural districts that are seeking to reduce educator turnover and district expenditures. Using a staggered treatment event study design, I am among the first to estimate the quasi-experimental effects of 4DSW adoption on teacher, principal, and paraprofessional…

School districts in the United States often borrow on the municipal bond market to pay for capital projects. Districts serving economically disadvantaged communities tend to receive lower credit ratings and pay higher interest rates. To remedy this problem, twenty-four states have established credit enhancement programs that promise to repay…

Objective/Research Question: Many localities have implemented promise programs, which cover tuition for students to attend college based on residency criteria. These "free college" programs have been shown to increase student enrollment, creating the need for additional institutional resources to support student graduation. We analyzed…

The Fair School Funding Plan (FSFP) presented in this policy brief is a bipartisan approach to school funding based on how much districts must spend to educate every child, including those who need different or additional support. The FSFP works because it is based on the actual cost of educating kids, sharing that cost between the state and local…

This is the first study to examine the fiscal effects of the New York property tax levy limit, using variation from the degree of fiscal stringency across school districts and over time in its first five years of implementation. Based on a difference-in-differences estimator, coupled with an event study specification, we find that the tax limit…