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

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.

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.

Before you reflexively deride this week’s GOP budget proposal consider this: it just might pave the way for greater investments in our schools.

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.

The Winter 2010 issue of Education Next is just  hitting newsstands (and subscribers’ mailboxes). ...

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".

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.

The general public is woefully uninformed as to how much is spent on K-12 public education and, by extension, how much that spending has grown. Why would this be the case? No mystery, really.

Everyone knows that school spending has been rising at a steady clip for just about forever. But is the Era of Big Spending coming to an end?