An influential theory argues that court-ordered school finance equalization undermines support for public schools. Residents of wealthy school districts who cannot keep their tax revenues for their own school districts may vote to limit school funding altogether. Proponents of this theory point to Serrano v. Priest, a 1977 decision of the California Supreme Court that mandated equalization of s...

This paper studies the effect of school finance reforms on the distribution of school spending across richer and poorer districts, and the consequences of spending equalization for the relative test performance of students from different family backgrounds. We find that states where the school finance system was declared unconstitutional in the 1980s increased the relative funding of low-income...

BACKGROUND Family and community involvement in schools is linked strongly to improvements in the academic achievement of students, better school attendance, and improved school programs and quality. METHODS The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention conducts the School Health Policies and Programs Study every 6 years. In 2006, computer-assisted telephone interviews or self-administered ma...

OBJECTIVE Recent school shootings and terrorist events have demonstrated the need for well-coordinated planning for school-based mass-casualty events. The objective of this study was to document the preparedness of public schools in the United States for the prevention of and the response to a mass-casualty event. METHODS A survey was mailed to 3670 school superintendents of public school dis...

BACKGROUND This article seeks to inform state and local school food policies by evaluating the impact of Connecticut's Healthy Food Certification (HFC), a program which provides monetary incentives to school districts that choose to implement state nutrition standards for all foods sold to students outside reimbursable school meals. METHODS Food service directors from all school districts par...

Introduction Across the country, school districts rely on a combination of local, state, and federal funds to operate schools – with local and state funds making up over 90 percent of all public school funding.i State and federal funds are distributed to districts on the basis of funding formulas. State funding formulas have a significant impact on the amount of funding that districts receive b...

Recent research demonstrates that the test score gap between relatively advantaged and relatively disadvantaged students is much higher in some school districts than it is in other districts. But measured school quality often varies dramatically within a school district, and therefore it is important to know whether individual schools differ in the relative success of advantaged and disadvantag...

Title of Document: THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN TEACHER UNIONS AND TEACHER QUALITY IN LARGE URBAN AND SUBURBAN SCHOOL DISTRICTS Jijun Zhang, Doctor of Philosophy, 2009 Directed By: Dr. Jennifer King Rice Department of Education Policy Studies This study utilizes the binomial hierarchical generalized linear modeling (HGLM) technique and nationally representative data (SASS 2003-2004) to examine the ...

Trends in the racial segregation of schools have been well documented, but less is known about trends in schools’ economic segregation. Residential segregation among neighborhoods by income has increased since 1970, but it is unclear whether segregation among schools or districts followed suit. We use multiple data sources to document trends from 1970 to 2010 in between-district residential seg...

With more than 80% of public school students attending the school assigned to them by district, it is clear that school district boundaries play a critical role in determining the educational opportunities and resources provided to students. Unfortunately, as school district lines are constantly redrawn, historical and anecdotal evidence suggests that these boundaries are often artificially man...