Proposals on how to incorporate state compensation into a foundation aid formula, under homestead exemptions from the property tax.

Many states provide homestead exemptions from the property tax. When states compensate school districts for these exemptions, they undermine the equity of their education finance system. This inequity can be eliminated by incorporating this state compensation into a foundation aid formula.

Using data from rural school districts in New York, this paper provides the first direct estimation of consolidations cost impacts. We find economies of size in operating and capital spending: doubling enrollment cuts total costs per pupil by 28 percent for a 300-pupil district and by 9 percent for a 1,500-pupil district.

Using data on students and teachers in grades three through eight in New York City, this study assesses the effects of such programs on the teacher workforce and on student achievement. We ask whether teachers who enter through these new routes are more or less effective at improving student achievement than other teachers and whether the presence of these alternative pathways affects the composition of New York City teaching workforce.

The column introduced five main sources of revenue to fund education finance reform: reallocate the existing state aid budget, impose a minimum local property tax rate, recapture revenue from wealthy districts, turn the property tax into a state tax, and create a broad-based tax.

The report tries to answer the question: How can we best ensure that reforms translate into improved educational practice in the City's classrooms, so that students may be assured the opportunity for the sound basic education to which they are entitled?

The link between school performance and property values is called public service capitalization. This column discusses the evidence about public service capitalization and the implications of this phenomenon for the design of an education finance reform program.

Education finance reform has many predictable ripple effects that policy makers should know about. This column discusses one important type of ripple effect, namely the impact of education finance reform on property values.

The report aims to be a comprehensive review of the status, characteristics, and effects of exit exams. It emphasizes developments that have occurred and research findings that have been released or publicized since the Center’s August 2004 report, State High School Exit Exams: A Maturing Reform.

The report provides a review of those assessments that New York’s students took during the 2004- 2005 school year.

Final Test: The Battle for Adequacy in America's Schools by Peter Schrag.

This book focuses on key aspects of revenue generation for the support of public schools. The first section of the book provides general information about revenue sources, trends, and frameworks for evaluating various taxation-based strategies for raising revenues for schools.

The paper discussed the role of teacher in student learning and reviewed various strategies to improve the quality of teacher workforce.

The author reviews the history of education finance litigation, focusing on the adequacy lawsuits of the last 15 years.

An overview of the research on state aid to education and a detailed look at state aid reform in five key states: Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Texas, and Vermont.

The article compares three studies on education adequacy standards for New York city and discusses the consequences of CFE decision on students.

The article introduces the development of CFE decision and its influence on school funding in New York City.

Analysis of state achievement growth as measured by the National Assessment of Educational progress shows that accountability systems introduced during the 1990s had a clear positive impact on student achievement. This single policy instrument did not, however, also lead to any narrowing in the black-white achievement gap (though it did narrow the Hispanic-white achievement gap). Moreover, the black-white gap appears to have been adversely impacted over the decade by increasing minority concentrations in the schools.

The study included 4,948 participants in Tennessee’s class-size experiment, Project STAR. Analyses showed that graduating was related to K–3 achievement and that attending small classes for 3 or more years increased the likelihood of graduating from high school, especially among students eligible for free lunch. Policy and research implications are discussed.

The paper summarizes the legal history of The DeRolph case, on school funding equity in Ohio State, and its impact on current funding system.

This paper explores a little-understood aspect of labor markets, their spatial geography. Using data from New York State, we find teacher labor markets to be geographically very small. Teachers express preferences to teach close to where they grew up and, controlling for proximity, they prefer areas with characteristics similar to their hometown.

This paper examines New York City elementary school teachers¡¦ decisions to stay in the same school, transfer to another school in the district, transfer to another district, or leave teaching in New York State during the first five years of their careers.

This artide proposes a general conception of educational adequacy and draws on a lengthy history of economic theory and emerging empirical evidence to support that conception..

The purpose of this article is to reinvigorate the discussion of vertical equity through an assessment of the funding systems in four states that ascertains how and to what extent risk factors are addressed.

This paper explores the current state education finance systems, the need for reinventing them to provide adequacy and equity aligned to standards based reform is discussed and discusses approaches for determining a base spending level considered adequate for the average child to reach high educational standards.