Centralization of school finance in Michigan

School Finance Reform in Michigan: An Analytical Framework

We examine whether the Michigan school funding reform of 1994 had general equilibrium effects in the Detroit metropolitan area. The reform had two components: centralization of school funding at the state level, with increases for low-revenue districts and revenue caps for highrevenue districts, and property tax reduction. We present a stylized equilibrium model whose main insight is that since...

Impact of School Finance Reform on Resource Equalization and Academic Performance: Evidence from Michigan

This paper investigates how the Michigan school finance reform affected educational performance in that state. In 1994, somewhat unexpectedly and without the prodding of any courts, Michigan radically altered its school financing system. The new plan, Proposal A, significantly increased state aid to the poorer districts and limited future increases in spending in the richest ones. In the proces...

University of Michigan Medical School.

Developments in School Finance: 2003

Redesigning School Finance Systems

CPRE researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have been working on school finance redesign since 1990. The issue that has driven this effort has been the goal of state standards-based education reform and, more recently, of the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act to teach all students to high standards. This goal has shifted the orientation of the education system from inputs to o...