School Spending
EdNext Readers Poll: Funding for Online Learning
When students decide to take a course online, should all the state funding for the course go to the organization that offers the course, or should some funding also go to local school districts to help defray other school costs?
School Spending
Spring Break Is Here: Can I get my unemployement insurance check?
Did you know that school bus drivers and cafeteria workers file unemployment claims whenever schools take a vacation break?
School Spending
Stretching the School-District Dollar
Rather than hope for revenue increases that are unlikely to materialize, smart leaders can turn the present budget crisis into an opportunity. Rethinking whom we hire, what they do, how we pay them, and how to incorporate technology—that’s where the big payoff is
School Spending
Misplaced Optimism and Weighted Funding
Liberals and conservatives alike have made "weighted student funding" a core idea of their reform prescriptions. Both groups see such weighted funding as providing more dollars to the specific schools they tend to focus upon, and both see it as inspiring improved achievement through newfound political pressures. Unfortunately, both groups are very likely wrong.
School Spending
The New Worst Way to Deal with Budget Problems
Of all of the options, reducing the length of the school year must be the absolute worst – at least from the perspective of students. But California, always proud of being a leader, has written into law that this is the preferred option if districts face budgetary shortfalls.
School Spending
Why the GOP Budget Plan Might Be Good for Education
Before you reflexively deride this week’s GOP budget proposal consider this: it just might pave the way for greater investments in our schools.
School Spending
School Funding: Do We Have to be as Poor as Our Neighbor?
In a provocative new school funding case, a federal court judge in Kansas City ruled against parents from the suburban Shawnee Mission school district who had wanted to increase property taxes above the state mandated limit. This is a local control debate that is sure to heat up as we stumble through the current financial crisis.
School Spending
No Recession for Schools
The Winter 2010 issue of Education Next is just hitting newsstands (and subscribers’ mailboxes). ...
School Spending
“The Cartel” in New Jersey
New Jersey is #1 in spending per public school student. Where does the money go, and why so much? The answers may be found in some of the bizarre and dismaying facts and stories recounted in a new education documentary entitled "The Cartel".
School Spending
Making Mountains Out of Molehills? Let the Reader Decide
A recent “Policy Memorandum” from the Economic Policy Institute by EPI researcher Monique Morrissey is sharply critical of our article “Peaks, Cliffs, and Valleys." Morrissey has a number of critiques of our articles, but the main one, as the title suggests, is that our metaphors are inappropriate, and there is nothing at all “peculiar” about the structure of retirement incentives in teacher pensions.