In 2002 the Council of the Great City Schools and its members set out to develop performance measures that could be used to improve business operations in urban public school districts. The Council launched the Performance Measurement and Benchmarking Project to achieve these objectives. The purposes of the project were to: (1) Establish a common…

"Efficiency in Higher Education" is a sub-system within the total education system in a country. Higher Education contributes a major role in the national development, enriching the human potential. At the same time, climbing on the pinnacles of higher education and enjoying its benefit is not an easy task to achieve for a large number…

This paper examines the effects of constraints in a Tiebout framework applied to school finance reforms. We use data from Michigan, which enacted a comprehensive school finance reform in 1994 that, in effect, ended local discretion over school spending. This scenario affords us a unique opportunity to study the implications of imposing limits on…

In this study, the 21st Century School Fund (21CSF), with support from the National Clearinghouse for Educational Facilities, examined the state capital outlay funding for elementary and secondary public education facility construction and modernization. The authors examined how much capital outlay has been expended by states from 2005-2008 as…

On October 8, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the 2010-11 Budget Act for the State of California. This budget was the outcome of many months of negotiation between the Governor and the Legislature. The Governor vetoed $963 million in spending from the Legislature's budget, arriving at a budget that addresses an estimated $19.1 billion…

State funding mechanisms are subject to intense political and economic scrutiny. The question asked most often tends to be, is the public getting sufficient return on their investment? Accountability standards arising from the No Child left Behind Act (NCLB) have sharpened the focus of this question to whether the students and schools are meeting…

The Australian Education Union (AEU) commissioned the Monash University-ACER Centre for the Economics of Education and Training (CEET) to review funding and staffing for VET (vocational education and training), and especially for TAFE (technical and further education), in the context of the recently set COAG (Council of Australian Governments)…

This document represents the submission of Universities UK to the 2010 Spending Review. It sets out why the authors believe universities are critical to the UK's future economic growth, what the impact of cuts to the budget for higher education would be, and the activities which universities are currently pursuing to secure national economic…

The year 2009 will be remembered as one of angst, with the economy dominating news around the world. Few libraries were immune to the extraordinary financial pressures. The library marketplace by year's end was in a weakened position, with prospects of a long recovery at best. Concern persists that even deeper budget cuts will come when federal…

A shortcoming of the conventional ordinary least squares (OLS) approaches for estimating median voter models of education demand is the inability to more fully explain the spatial relationships between neighboring school districts. Consequently, two school districts that appear to be descriptively similar in terms of conventional measures of…

This paper presents a case study of two California school districts, San Francisco and Oakland, each of which have implemented their own versions of what is popularly known as a weighted student formula (WSF). One primary goal of the WSF policy is to increase the equity with which resources are distributed to schools. With respect to equity, the…

The following study attempted to ascertain the instructional cost-effectiveness of public high school teachers towards high school completion through a financially based econometric analysis. Essentially, public high school instruction expenditures and completer data were collected from 2000 to 2007 and bivariate interaction analyzed through a…

Spurred by a deep recession and large budget shortfalls, the California Legislature in 2009 enacted what was arguably the largest change to California's school finance system in decades--relaxing spending restrictions on more than 40 categorical programs through 2012-13, extended later to 2014-15. Categorical funding, which gives school districts…

Approximately half of all New York City public school students who live in families with incomes less than 185% of the federal poverty level (FPL) do not graduate from high school. These dropouts are much less likely to achieve economic self-sufficiency in adulthood. This creates both a fiscal and social burden. Rothstein, Wilder and Allgood…

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) is due for reauthorization, and Senator Tom Harkin and Congressman Chakkah Fattah have both proposed revisions to the comparability provision of the federal Title I program. Harkin's proposed legislation requires the use of per pupil expenditures, including actual teacher salaries, to demonstrate…