Latest School Finance Research
Deborah Cunningham attended the annual meeting of the Association of Education Finance and Policy in Washington D.C., February 26-28, 2015. This conference represents a concentrated opportunity to hear about the latest research studies on using resources (broadly thought of as people, time and money) to improve learning and teaching.
Click here for the program for the conference, which lists specific paper titles. If you are interested in a particular paper, please contact me (dcunningham@nysasbo.org) and I will send it to you.
I participated in a session (8.05) on Finance Policy in the United States and presented a paper on New York State School Finance 2013-14: A Year in Review. This session included a presentation on California’s new funding formula, predictions concerning the next wave of school finance litigation at the federal level, and a review of school finance policies in the 50 states. This latter work is posted at www.schoolfinances.info and will be especially useful to us in New York State as we pursue changes and want an overview of practices in other states, against which to gauge our progress.
Some of the sessions (and session numbers for cross referencing to specific papers in the program) I attended included:
- A focus on state and district policies that affect high school course taking (4.09) including how to increase success in advanced coursework by historically underserved groups, and a subsequent reduction in remedial coursework in college and enrollment in non-remedial courses in college.
- California’s policy U-turn: local control or state abdication (5.02)? This session examined a major change in California’s school funding and accountability system to replace a complex array of categorical and state funding with a single foundation formula to be phased in and a decentralization of accountability from the state to local school districts. While this sounds similar to New York’s 2007 school funding change, it bears watching California’s experience to better learn about challenges and opportunities in school reform.
- Improving educator evaluation practices (6.03). This session presented data on the impact of training for principals on educator evaluation, surveys of teachers and principals evaluated to assess their satisfaction over time and improve the educator evaluation process, problems associated with the measurement of educator effectiveness, and impacts on student achievement and teacher retention.
- Voters, local politics and school finance (7.13). This session presented data on academic achievement for schools with varying sources of state, local and federal revenue, the impact of open enrollment on school bond voting, and the nature of deficits in Michigan public school districts. The Michigan study documented the negative affect of student enrollment in charter schools on the sending school district fund balance and overall financial condition.