Behold the Role of the District in Education Finance

Abstract

The last few decades have witnessed a flurry of education finance activity centered on the role of the state, focusing on issues such as resource adequacy and equity across districts. Is the state giving districts enough money to do the job of education? Does the state funding formula or the state’s reliance on local property taxes favor some districts over others? But this Peabody Journal of Education themed issue focuses instead on the role of the district in education finance. School districts are chiefly responsible for converting tax revenues into educational expenditures at each of their schools. In that sense, this collection is about spending rather than revenues. At the risk of oversimplifying school finance, once the revenues are delivered to districts, it is then the districts that make the difficult decisions on how to spend those dollars, how much to deploy to each school, how to balance competing priorities for spending, and so on. Sure, some dollars come with strings attached, but that doesn’t negate the fact that districts then make myriad choices, from how to structure teachers’ salaries to whether to consolidate schools. Traditionally, these within-district financial policies and choices haven’t received as much attention as state education finance policy, in part because the data were much harder to come by. But the data landscape is changing rapidly. The federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) of 2015 included a landmark provision requiring states to report school-by-school per-student spending data. Some articles in this issue (Part 1) offer a first attempt at uncovering what the data mean, particularly in the context of existing financial analyses. How much money each school gets is, at least to some degree, a function of actions made at the district. In that sense, this examination of districts allows us to explore how funds are distributed to the unit of the school. With less research attention directed at district finance, scholars do not have a strong understanding of what factors drive school district resource allocation patterns across schools. School district budget models have been understudied and undertheorized. For example, why (and how) do some districts allocate resources more “progressively” than other districts? What staffing and budget models produce more equitable patterns of resource allocation? These questions are addressed in Part 2. With new school-by-school finance data, researchers are better able to connect school-by-school spending decisions to the corresponding schools’ student outcomes, and begin to understand what kinds of district policies drive a more robust relationship between spending and outcomes. School districts around the country are reforming their budget and staffing models but have limited evidence from which to base these budget decisions. Would granting additional local budgetary autonomy to school principals improve student outcomes in those schools? To what extent have weighted student funding models improved productivity or closed student achievement gaps? The papers in Part 3 do just that, applying analysis of spending alongside outcomes on a school-by-school basis. This focus on the district role in resource allocation is new. But novelty certainly is not the driver behind this issue. Better understanding of what happens to money once it reaches districts is warranted because what the district does (or does not do) has wide-reaching implications for the extent to which dollars generated at state (or federal) levels bring value to students. This spotlight on the district role in school finance isn’t temporary. If anything, it is likely to get brighter. Other