The West Virginia School Building Authority has arbitrarily emphasized economies of scale as a requirement for statewide facilities funding. This requirement has forced consolidation in sparsely populated areas with resultant "diseconomies of scale" related to transportation costs, increased dropout rates, and decreased parental and…

Per-pupil expenditures in the lowest spending states are half of those in the highest-spending states. The federal government could equalize interstate spending by subsidizing spending in poorer states. The plan must consider the dollar's varying purchasing power, higher expenditures for educating disadvantaged children, and disincentives for…

The current obsession with standardizing curricula and measuring output may further reduce teacher agency and marginalize segments of our society that are already cheated by the system. Enormous discrepancies exist among public-school facilities, resources, and teachers. Multicultural education will suffer unless legislatures address these…

Discusses six themes related to inequalities in education and their impact on student achievement: Social inequities, curriculum and assessment, teacher expectations, teacher allotment inequities, social choice, and funding inequities. (Contains 48 references.) (PKP)

Describes an eight-step integrated school district strategy for individual school reform that makes the pursuit of greater school equity, accountability, and efficiency a mutually supporting, goal-oriented activity capable of facilitating student academic excellence. Discusses how districts and schools can benefit from this and emphasizes steps to…

The State Educational Technology Directors Association is pleased to release its third annual Trends Report on educational technology. In addition to reporting trends on the third round (FY 04) of the No Child Left Behind, Title II, Part D, Enhancing Education Through Technology (EETT) program, the 2006 report also includes general state policy…

As part of litigation challenging the equity and adequacy of school funding in Alabama, educational resources and school conditions were examined in the highest and lowest funded school districts in the state. Identification of these districts revealed that all eight of the highest funded districts were urban systems, while all eight of the lowest…

This paper provides a historical review of equity in funding education in Alberta. It describes government attempts to address fiscal inequities and shows how the introduction of full spending in 1994 addressed many of the equity problems in Alberta. Full provincial funding of education has proved an overall success, but it faces the following…

Reform of New Zealand schools has been ongoing since 1988, when the Task Force to Review Education Administration recommended devolution of managerial control, within national guidelines, for each of the country's 2,700 state school boards of trustees with a majority of elected parents' representatives. Reforms instituted since 1989 across all…

In 1989, the Texas State Board of Education undertook the responsibility for developing a 4-year plan and for establishing a vision for education that extends into the next century. This document contains the goals for education established by the 71st Texas legislature. The mission of public education in Texas is for it to be characterized by…

The J-50 Report, one of the most complicated entitlement reports that any state agency requires, provides information for funding and monitoring special education services and operations throughout California and for making special education funding allocations equitable. This manual was developed to assist local educational agency (LEA) and…

In almost all states, there is substantial local variation in per pupil expenditures for public elementary and secondary education. This results from the mix of state, local, and federal revenues received by most local educational agencies (LEAs), local variations in student needs, cost of providing services, and ability and willingness to raise…

Achieving a state education finance program that is fair to students, taxpayers, teachers, and school districts is complicated by varying student needs and different property tax rates and school expenses among districts. Attempts at equitable allocation of state aid funds and other educational resources should be guided by the principles of…

The purpose of this monograph is to explore the concept of educational adequacy, defined by Cubberley as "a generous system of free public schools," and to apply those measures in an analysis of educational adequacy in the state of Illinois. The difficulty in defining what constitutes a generous education is that there is no clear…

Partly because of the rise of block grants, federal distribution mechanisms raise the issues of federal control and distributional equity in elementary-secondary grant programs. Data--drawn from such major programs as aid for education of the disadvantaged, aid for education of the handicapped, vocational education, and bilingual education--were…