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Financing Public Schools moves beyond the basics of financing public elementary and secondary education to explore the historical, philosophical, and legal underpinnings of a viable public school system. Coverage includes the operational aspects of school finance, including issues regarding teacher salaries and pensions, budgeting for instructional programs, school transportation, and risk management. Diving deeper than other school finance books, the authors explore the political framework within which schools must function, discuss the privatization of education and its effects on public schools, offer perspectives regarding education as an investment in human capital, and expertly explain complex financial and economic issues. This comprehensive text provides the tools to apply the many and varied fiscal concepts and practices that are essential for aspiring public school administrators who aim to provide responsible stewardship for their students. Special Features: "Definitional Boxes" and "Key Terms" throughout chapters enhance understanding of difficult concepts. Coverage of legal, political, and historical issues provides a broader context and more complex understanding of school finance. Offers in-depth exploration of business management of financial resources, including fiscal accounting, school facilities, school transportation, financing with debt, and the nuances of school budgeting techniques.
This book examines the fundamental role of politics in funding our public schools and fills a conceptual imbalance in the current literature in school finance and educational policy. Unlike those who are primarily concerned about cost efficiency, Kenneth Wong specifies how resources are allocated for what purposes at different levels of the government. In contrast to those who focus on litigation as a way to reduce funding gaps, he underscores institutional stalemate and the lack of political will to act as important factors that affect legislative deadlock in school finance reform. Wong defines how politics has sustained various types of "rules" that affect the allocation of resources at the federal, state, and local level. While these rules have been remarkably stable over the past twenty to thirty years, they have often worked at cross-purposes by fragmenting policy and constraining the education process at schools with the greatest needs. Wong's examination is shaped by several questions. How do these rules come about? What role does politics play in retention of the rules? Do the federal, state, and local governments espouse different policies? In what ways do these policies operate at cross-purposes? How do they affect educational opportunities? Do the policies cohere in ways that promote better and more equitable student outcomes? Wong concludes that the five types of entrenched rules for resource allocation are rooted in existing governance arrangements and seemingly impervious to partisan shifts, interest group pressures, and constitutional challenge. And because these rules foster policy fragmentation and embody initiatives out of step with the performance-based reform agenda of the 1990s, the outlook for positive change in public education is uncertain unless fairly radical approaches are employed. Wong also analyzes four allocative reform models, two based on the assumption that existing political structures are unlikely to change and two that seek to empower actors at the school level. The two models for systemwide restructuring, aimed at intergovernmental coordination and/or integrated governance, would seek to clarify responsibilities for public education among federal, state, and local authorities-above all, integrating political and educational accountability. The other two models identified by Wong shift control from state and district to the school, one based on local leadership and the other based on market forces. In discussing the guiding principles of the four models, Wong takes care to identify both the potential and limitations of each. Written with a broad policy audience in mind, Wong's book should appeal to professionals interested in the politics of educational reform and to teachers of courses dealing with educational policy and administration and intergovernmental relations.
Improving public schools through performance-based funding Spurred by court rulings requiring states to increase public-school funding, the United States now spends more per student on K-12 education than almost any other country. Yet American students still achieve less than their foreign counterparts, their performance has been flat for decades, millions of them are failing, and poor and minority students remain far behind their more advantaged peers. In this book, Eric Hanushek and Alfred Lindseth trace the history of reform efforts and conclude that the principal focus of both courts and legislatures on ever-increasing funding has done little to improve student achievement. Instead, Hanushek and Lindseth propose a new approach: a performance-based system that directly links funding to success in raising student achievement. This system would empower and motivate educators to make better, more cost-effective decisions about how to run their schools, ultimately leading to improved student performance. Hanushek and Lindseth have been important participants in the school funding debate for three decades. Here, they draw on their experience, as well as the best available research and data, to show why improving schools will require overhauling the way financing, incentives, and accountability work in public education.
The National Education Finance Academy (NEFA) has completed a project providing a one- of-a-kind practical book on funding P-12 education in the United States. The book, entitled Funding Public Schools in the United States and Indian Country is a single volume with a clear and short chapter about each state. Approximately 50% of chapters are authored by university faculty who are members of NEFA; approximately 25% of chapters are authored by state department of education officials and/or state school board association officials; and the remaining 25% of chapters are authored by ASBO affiliate states. Each chapter contains information about: • Each state’s aid formula background; • Basic support program description and operation (the state aid formula) including how school aid is apportioned (e.g., state appropriations, local tax contributions, cost share ratios, and more); • Supplemental funding options relating to how school districts raise funds attached to or above the regular state aid scheme; • Compensatory programs operated in school districts and how those are funded and aided; • Categorical programs operated in school districts and how those are funded and aided; • Any funding supports for transportation operations; • Any funding supports for physical facilities and operations; and • Other state aids not covered in the above list.
Designed for aspiring school leaders, this text presents the realities of school finance policy and issues, as well as the tools for formulating and managing school budgets. In an era of dwindling fiscal support for public schools, increasing federal mandates, and additional local budget requirements, educational leaders must be able to articulate sound finance theory and application. The authors move beyond coverage found in other texts by providing critical analysis and unique chapters on misconceptions about school finance; fiscal capacity, fiscal effort, adequacy, and efficiency; demographic issues; and spending and student achievement. Examining local, state, and federal education spending, this text gives readers the foundation to understand school finance and knowledgeably educate colleagues, parents, and other stakeholders about its big-picture issues, facts, and trends. The new edition of American Public School Finance will help educational leaders at all stages of their careers become informed advocates for education finance practice and reform. New in this edition: Expanded coverage on school choice Discussion of new standards and law Updated exploration of student demographics and its impact on learning Advanced pedagogical features such as connections to the latest Professional Standards for Educational Leaders (PSEL), Focus Questions, Case Studies, and Chapter Questions/Assignments Complementary electronic resources designed to deepen and extend the topics in each chapter and to provide instructors with lecture slides and other teaching strategies.
High-quality early care and education for children from birth to kindergarten entry is critical to positive child development and has the potential to generate economic returns, which benefit not only children and their families but society at large. Despite the great promise of early care and education, it has been financed in such a way that high-quality early care and education have only been available to a fraction of the families needing and desiring it and does little to further develop the early-care-and-education (ECE) workforce. It is neither sustainable nor adequate to provide the quality of care and learning that children and families needâ€"a shortfall that further perpetuates and drives inequality. Transforming the Financing of Early Care and Education outlines a framework for a funding strategy that will provide reliable, accessible high-quality early care and education for young children from birth to kindergarten entry, including a highly qualified and adequately compensated workforce that is consistent with the vision outlined in the 2015 report, Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8: A Unifying Foundation. The recommendations of this report are based on essential features of child development and early learning, and on principles for high-quality professional practice at the levels of individual practitioners, practice environments, leadership, systems, policies, and resource allocation.
Much has been written about how public schools in the United States are funded. However, missing in the current literature landscape is a nuanced discussion of funding as it relates to public charter schools. This text, authored by researchers and professionals working in the charter school world, provides readers with a comprehensive overview of issues related to the funding and operation of charter schools. The book opens with an introduction to charter schools and how they are funded. The financial management and oversight of charter schools and issues related to funding equity, including how charter schools impact district school finances, are addressed. Special considerations for charter schools related to serving special education students and transportation issues are also addressed. After reading this book, readers will have a thorough understanding of how charter schools are funded and managed financially.
Nearly the whole of America’s partisan politics centers on a single question: Can markets solve our social problems? And for years this question has played out ferociously in the debates about how we should educate our children. From the growth of vouchers and charter schools to the implementation of No Child Left Behind, policy makers have increasingly turned to market-based models to help improve our schools, believing that private institutions—because they are competitively driven—are better than public ones. With The Public School Advantage, Christopher A. and Sarah Theule Lubienski offer powerful evidence to undercut this belief, showing that public schools in fact outperform private ones. For decades research showing that students at private schools perform better than students at public ones has been used to promote the benefits of the private sector in education, including vouchers and charter schools—but much of these data are now nearly half a century old. Drawing on two recent, large-scale, and nationally representative databases, the Lubienskis show that any benefit seen in private school performance now is more than explained by demographics. Private schools have higher scores not because they are better institutions but because their students largely come from more privileged backgrounds that offer greater educational support. After correcting for demographics, the Lubienskis go on to show that gains in student achievement at public schools are at least as great and often greater than those at private ones. Even more surprising, they show that the very mechanism that market-based reformers champion—autonomy—may be the crucial factor that prevents private schools from performing better. Alternatively, those practices that these reformers castigate, such as teacher certification and professional reforms of curriculum and instruction, turn out to have a significant effect on school improvement. Despite our politics, we all agree on the fundamental fact: education deserves our utmost care. The Public School Advantage offers exactly that. By examining schools within the diversity of populations in which they actually operate, it provides not ideologies but facts. And the facts say it clearly: education is better off when provided for the public by the public.