Search

This First Look report presents data on public elementary and secondary education revenues and expenditures at the local education agency (LEA) or school district level for fiscal year (FY) 2022. Specifically, this report includes the following types of school district finance data: (1) revenue, current expenditure, and capital outlay expenditure totals; (2) revenues by source; (3) current expenditures by function and object; (4) revenues and current expenditures per pupil; and (5) revenues and expenditures from COVID-19 Federal Assistance Funds. This First Look report focuses on education revenues and expenditures at the school district level. The finance data used in this report are from the School District Finance Survey (F-33), 2F 3 a component of the Common Core of Data (CCD). The CCD is a group of annual public elementary/secondary data collections administered by NCES. The F-33 survey consists of LEA-level finance data submitted annually to the U.S. Census Bureau (Census Bureau) by state education agencies (SEAs) in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. SEAs report financial data covering services that provide or support prekindergarten through high school for public education for a variety of types of LEAs. These LEAs include regular school districts, independent charter school districts, as well as a substantial number of administrative and operating LEAs that are unlike typical school districts (e.g., education service agencies that provide specialized education services for school districts, such as vocational and other specialized education services for school districts). The purpose of this First Look report is to introduce new data through the presentation of tables containing descriptive information. The selected findings chosen for this report demonstrate the range of information available when using F-33 data files and are not intended to emphasize any particular issue(s).

More than 90% of IDEA funding is allocated to Part B, Grants to States (Section 611), which contains funding and policy provisions related to special education for children ages 3 to 21. The influence of federal Part B, Grants to States funding on state and local funding decisions is twofold: 1) it links eligibility for IDEA grants to compliance with programmatic and administrative requirements, and 2) it mandates that states and districts maintain consistent levels of state and local funding for special education annually. This brief details its eligibility requirements, allocation methods, and funding trends.

The federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) entitles students with disabilities to a free appropriate public education. Students with disabilities often require additional support to enable them to achieve academic and functional goals relative to their nondisabled peers. These legally protected supports and services all add up to a need for additional school funding to support the education of children with disabilities. This brief examines how states and the federal government allocate funding to support the educational needs of students with disabilities and identifies questions that state advocates and policymakers can pose to better understand and improve their state's system for funding special education services.

This First Look report introduces new data for national and state-level public elementary and secondary revenues and expenditures for fiscal year (FY) 2022. Specifically, this report includes the following school finance data: (1) revenue and expenditure totals; (2) revenues by source; (3) expenditures by function, subfunction, and object; (4) current expenditures; (5) revenues and current expenditures per pupil; (6) expenditures from Title I funds; and (7) revenues and expenditures from COVID-19 Federal Assistance Funds. The expenditure functions include instruction, support services, food services, and enterprise operations. The support services function is further broken down into seven subfunctions: instructional staff support services, pupil support services, general administration, school administration, operations and maintenance, student transportation, other support services (such as business services). Objects reported within a function or subfunction include salaries and wages, employee benefits, purchased services, supplies, and equipment. The purpose of a First Look report is to introduce new data through the presentation of tables containing descriptive information. The selected findings chosen for this report demonstrate the range of information available when using NPEFS. They do not represent all of the data and are not meant to emphasize any particular issue. While the tables in this report include data for all NPEFS respondents, the selected findings are limited to the 50 states and the District of Columbia.

At their best, K-12 public school systems can be engines of social and economic mobility. Unfortunately, schools in lower-income districts -- whose students have the greatest academic needs -- often receive less funding than their counterparts in more affluent districts. Discussions about closing these funding gaps usually zoom all the way out to the state level or all the way down to the district level. But a big part of the problem lies in how funding is distributed across districts in the same metro area -- and in state policies that allow wealthy communities to raise and keep large amounts of local revenue exclusively for their own schools. "Leveling the Landscape: An Analysis of K-12 Funding Inequities Within Metro Areas" takes a closer look at the scale and sources of education funding within 123 large metro areas in 38 states, focusing on funding disparities among districts serving the same region. Key takeaways include: (1) a majority of public school students (62%) live in large metro areas with more than five districts -- a level of fragmentation that makes funding disparities more likely; (2) within fragmented metro areas, wealthy districts often generate much more local funding per student than less affluent districts; (3) state policies, despite their progressive tilt, rarely bridge this gap -- and often don't even come close; (4) in 49 of the 123 large metro areas we examined, school districts in affluent areas receive the most funding per pupil; (5) closing the state and local funding gap between districts within the metro areas we examined would cost $26 billion in additional state funding per year; and (6) more ambitious policies can greatly reduce or even eliminate funding disparities. The report also explores policy tools state leaders can use to ensure all districts within the same metro area at the very least receive similar funding per student and ideally, set the stage for even greater levels of per-pupil funding to flow to higher-needs districts.

In an effort to reduce state spending on special education in public schools, New Jersey moved to census-based funding as part of the new school funding formula, the School Funding Reform Act (SFRA), adopted in 2008. The census approach funds all districts using the statewide average classification rate and a statewide average "excess cost." This report found that: (1) Classification rates for special education vary greatly among school districts, resulting in the inequitable distribution of resources to fund districts' actual special education enrollment; (2) In 2022-23, districts with classification rates higher than the statewide average received $378 million less than if they were funded on their actual special education enrollment; and (3) Districts with higher-than-average classification rates must divert funding from general education programs or raise additional local revenue to fill the gap for unfunded special education students. In this report, the authors show that census-based funding does not meet the needs of New Jersey school districts and the students, in both special and general education, they serve. The analyses presented in this report demonstrate the need for New Jersey to convene school finance and special education experts to explore and recommend alternative funding models for special education that would better meet the needs of the state's school districts.

Most Americans today need some education beyond high school to secure a well-paying job, and higher education is a key factor in social and economic mobility. But higher education is not accessible to all students. To further equalize opportunity, states must understand options for improving the way they fund higher education. America's public K-12 system has been grappling with similar funding disparities for decades -- challenges that offer important lessons for postsecondary funding. Bellwether's analysis, "Strengthening State Higher Education Funding: Lessons Learned From K-12," identifies insights and lessons from K-12 finance policy that may be instructive as states rework how they fund higher education. This report explores four topics and associated questions that are also relevant across K-12 education: (1) Equity: How can states distribute funding to students and public IHEs with the greatest needs?; (2) Adequacy: How much funding is enough to achieve the desired outcomes?; (3) Cost Sharing: How can local governments and states share the cost of public higher education?; and (4) Stability: How can public IHEs secure consistent and predictable funding?

The Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund (ESSER) was the largest onetime federal investment in K-12 schools in history, funneling almost $200 billion to states and school districts. We use novel data from Washington State to investigate the extent to which ESSER funding causally influenced spending on school personnel. We argue one cannot infer this directly from ESSER claims data because of the fungibility of school budgets. Thus, we rely on a more direct signal of district hiring decisions: public education job postings scraped from district hiring websites. To address endogeneity concerns, our preferred approach employs an instrumental variables strategy that exploits a formula mechanism used to determine Title I funding for 2020-21 (and thus ESSER allocations in 2022) based on the number of Title I formula-eligible children. We find strong, arguably causal, evidence that public school hiring increased in response to the availability of ESSER funding. Specifically, we estimate that each $1,000 in ESSER allocations caused districts to seek to hire $206 in additional staff, disproportionately teachers. These estimates suggest that roughly 12,000 new staff (including 5,100 teachers) were hired in Washington because of ESSER. In the absence of new funding, school staffing budgets will likely need to contract substantially following the sunset of ESSER.

English learners (ELs) are one of the fastest-growing student groups in the U.S. K-12 system, making up about one in 10 students enrolled in public schools nationwide. Despite research showing that EL students need more resources and supports to be successful in school, funding at the federal, state, and local levels to provide those additional resources is largely inadequate and not well targeted to students' needs. This brief addresses the following questions: (1) Why is funding for EL students important? (2) What characteristics in the EL population are important to consider in funding systems? and (3) How are programs and services for EL students currently funded?

A 50-cent-per-pack tax on cigarettes and other tobacco products has been endorsed by California voters to fund early childhood services under Proposition 10, California Children and Families First Act of 1998. In compliance with the legislative requirement of Result-Based Accountability (RBA) on revenue spending, this report delineates evaluation findings from 39 programs that received over $7.7 million of the annual state investment in Kern County, the third largest county in California by land area. Following the RBA model, this report incorporates qualitative and quantitative analyses of the program's effectiveness and service integration. A five-chapter structure is adopted to support the dissemination of the multilevel findings in Fiscal Year 2022-2023 -- Built on the description of the Commission leadership in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 contains assessment findings to address the program impact on Child Health, Family Functioning, and Child Development. Chapter 3 clarifies service partnership building in Systems of Care. Improvement of child well-being and family functioning is summarized in Chapter 4 to document the turning-the-curve process on important indicators of child well-being and parent support. The report concludes in Chapter 5 with a review of past recommendations and an introduction to new recommendations for next year. Netdraw, Quanteda in R, SAS and SPSS packages are employed to support data visualization, text analytics, and statistical computing. [For "First 5 Kern Annual Report 2021-2022," see ED626036.]

In the context of the Higher Education Standards Framework (Threshold Standards) 2021, 'academic integrity' describes a provider's responsibility to ensure its staff and students act with honesty, trust, fairness, respect and responsibility as they engage in learning and teaching in courses and units of study. (See TEQSA's resources on academic integrity). Similarly, 'research integrity' describes a provider's responsibility to ensure research is conducted ethically and responsibly and to promote a culture of ethical and responsible research. The Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research 2018 (Responsible Conduct of Research Code) sets out a number of responsibilities and principles that apply to providers and researchers. Responsibilities relevant to providers include: (1) the development and maintenance of current and readily available policies and procedures, which ensure institutional practices are consistent with the principles and responsibilities of the Responsible Conduct of Research Code; (2) providing mechanisms to receive concerns or complaints about potential breaches of the Responsible Conduct of Research Code and investigate and resolve potential breaches; and (3) ensuring breaches are investigated in an effective way in accordance with procedural fairness and the welfare of all parties to an investigation. The purpose and intent of the guidance note about academic and research integrity is to support providers in ensuring they have the relevant policies, processes, training, oversight, and culture to protect and maintain the integrity of their academia and research

In 2021-2022, Head Start served nearly 790,000 young children, primarily from low-income families. However, the Department of Health and Human Services' (HHS) estimates that far more children are eligible than can be served due to limited resources, heightening the importance of targeting services effectively. House Report 117-96 includes a provision for the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to review the nationwide distribution of Head Start resources and what could help better align funding with need. This report examines the extent to which: (1) Head Start resources align geographically with child poverty; (2) statutory provisions support aligning resources with need; and (3) Office of Head Start (OHS), uses its grantmaking authority to align resources with need. GAO analyzed Head Start enrollment data from 2022 and Head Start funding and Census child poverty data from 2006 and 2021 (most recent available comparable data), interviewed OHS officials and stakeholder organizations, such as the National Head Start Association; and reviewed relevant federal laws and agency documents.

The provisions in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) include (1) the requirement for states to periodically review resource allocation in local education agencies (LEAs) serving a significant number of schools identified for comprehensive support and improvement (CSI), targeted support and improvement (TSI), and additional targeted support and improvement (ATSI) and (2) the requirement that CSI and ATSI plans both identify and address local resource inequities. ESSA requires states to periodically review resource allocation to support school improvement in schools that qualify for comprehensive and targeted support. In 2019, the Resource Allocation Review Community of Practice (RAR CoP) of the United States Department of Education (the Department) provided a useful foundation. The RAR CoP calls upon state agencies to connect the additional resource inequity provisions outlined in ESSA and align resource allocation reviews with the comprehensive school improvement. Building on the guidance offered by the RAR CoP, Utah, with the support of WestEd's Region 15 Comprehensive Center (R15CC), was among the first states to design and implement an RAR process. This report shares some discoveries and lessons learned during the design and implementation process.

This document provides state education agency (SEA) leaders with a systematized approach to identifying and defining elements, major tasks, and deliverables for conducting a meaningful resource allocation review (RAR). Based on the findings of an intensive four-year design process, field research, and recommendations from the pilot audit of the RAR process conducted by the U.S. Department of Education, this document: (1) offers education leaders at the state and local level with concrete examples of resource inequities; (2) presents considerations for decision-making around resources, and (3) proposes ways to reduce the burden on LEAs and schools by streamlining the RAR completion process.

To help the nation respond to the pandemic, Congress injected about $4.6 trillion into the U.S. economy through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act and subsequent legislation. Of this amount, over $75 billion was directed to institutions of higher education through the Higher Education Emergency Relief (HEER) Fund, including nearly $25 billion to community colleges. Using data from the U.S. Department of Education's Education Stabilization Fund Transparency Portal and the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, this ARCC Network report examines how HEER funds were distributed to community colleges and the extent to which the colleges spent those funds. It also explores how HEER funding and spending patterns differed by institutional and student characteristics. HEER funding was based mostly on particular kinds of enrollments: States and community colleges with higher enrollments received more funds, and those with higher percentages of Pell recipients and full-time students tended to receive larger awards. The majority of HEER funds were intended to aid in the transition to distance learning, support faculty and staff training, and maintain core instruction and services at colleges. A substantial portion of HEER funding also went to students in the form of emergency aid, and some colleges received "other" HEER funding based on institutional characteristics to address additional unmet needs. Community colleges spent nearly all the HEER funding they received: Collectively, 976 community colleges spent 95% of funds, and nearly half the colleges (484) spent virtually all of their HEER funds. Colleges that spent less of their HEER funding tended to have received larger per-student awards. [This report was written with the Accelerating Recovery in Community Colleges (ARCC) Network.]

In the United States, K-12 school finance is largely controlled by the states. Every year, hundreds of billions of dollars in public funds are distributed based on 51 different configurations of formulas, rules, and regulations to over 13,000 districts that vary in terms of the students they serve, their ability to raise revenue locally, and many other characteristics. Good school finance systems compensate for factors states cannot control (e.g., student poverty, labor costs) using levers that they can control (e.g., driving funding to districts that need it most). The authors have devised a framework that evaluates states based largely on how well they accomplish this balance. Each state's funding is assessed while accounting directly for the students and communities served by its public schools. In this sixth edition of the annual report, the K-12 school finance systems of all 50 states and the District of Columbia is evaluated. The latest year of data presented is the 2020-21 school year. [This report was co-prepared by University of Miami School of Education and Human Development.]

This brief highlights the equity issues and potential negative consequences related to a lack of access to menstrual products at U.S. institutions of higher education (IHEs). It also describes promising strategies and practices that IHEs can implement to increase access to menstrual products.

The Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) annually submits a report outlining the method used in determining the coefficients for each site characteristic used to establish the transportation allocation for the following year. The Student Transportation Allocation Reporting System (STARS) will determine the 2024-25 school year allocation. The 2024-25 regression analysis will use data elements from spring 2024, fall 2024, and winter 2025 reporting periods.

The Johnson-O'Malley (JOM) program provides academic and cultural supports to meet the specialized and unique educational needs of American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) students enrolled in public schools and select tribal schools. The Bureau of Indian Education (BIE), within the Department of the Interior, contracts with Tribes, tribal organizations, states, public school districts and others who provide JOM services to eligible students. Since 1995, BIE has relied on the same count of eligible students who received services that year to determine its budget allocation for the program, according to agency officials. In 2018, Congress passed the Johnson-O'Malley Supplemental Indian Education Program Modernization Act (the JOM Modernization Act or the act) to update and modernize the program. The act includes provisions for BIE to conduct and report on two student counts: a one-time count to estimate the number of AI/AN students potentially eligible for JOM program services and a separate, reoccurring annual count of students currently receiving services. In addition, the act includes a provision for us to review BIE's process for conducting these student counts. This report includes information on the steps BIE took, or plans to take, to estimate the number of students potentially eligible for JOM services, count students currently receiving services, and distribute JOM funds to contractors based on the number of students they serve.

COVID-19 upended schooling across the United States, but with what consequences for the state-level institutions that drive most education policy? This paper reports findings on two related research questions. First, what were the most important ways state government education policymakers changed schools and schooling from the moment they began to reckon with the seriousness of COVID-19 through the first full academic year of the pandemic? Second, how deep did those changes go -- are there indications the pandemic triggered efforts to make lasting changes in states' education policymaking institutions? Using multiple-methods research focused on Colorado, Florida, Louisiana, Michigan, and Oregon, we documented policies enacted during the period from March 2020 through June 2021 across states and across sectors (traditional and choice) in three COVID-19-related education policy domains: school closings and reopenings, budgeting and resource allocation, and assessment and accountability systems. We found that states quickly enacted radical changes to policies that had taken generations to develop. They mandated sweeping school closures in Spring 2020, and then a diverse array of school reopening policies in the 2020/2021 school year. States temporarily modified their attendance-based funding systems and allocated massive federal COVID-19 relief funds. Finally, states suspended annual student testing, modified the wide array of accountability policies and programs linked to the results of those tests, and adapted to new assessment methods. These crisis-driven policy changes deeply disrupted long-established patterns and practices in education. Despite this, we found that state education governance systems remained resilient, and that at least during the first 16 months of the pandemic, stakeholders showed little interest in using the crisis to trigger more lasting institutional change. We hope these findings enable state policymakers to better prepare for future crises.

The Education for Homeless Children and Youths (EHCY) program aims to ensure that all homeless children and youths have equal access to the same free, appropriate public education provided to other children and youths, including public preschool. For students without a stable living situation, the program provides funds to support access to education in the same school a student attended prior to experiencing homelessness, known as the school of origin. EHCY provides formula grants to state educational agencies (SEAs), which in turn provide competitive subgrants to local educational agencies (LEAs). EHCY was originally authorized under Title VII, Part B, of the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act (McKinney-Vento Act; P.L. 100-77, as amended). It was last reauthorized as part of the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 (ESSA, P.L. 114-95), which was signed into law in December 2015 and authorized appropriations through FY2020. While the definition of "homeless" varies across federal agencies, the U.S. Department of Education's (ED's) definition includes children and youths who may be living in a variety of temporary living conditions. This is broader than definitions under other federal programs that may only count those living unsheltered or in shelters. EHCY relies on local liaisons to identify homeless children and youths at different points during the school year. This report begins with a description of the structure and purpose of EHCY, followed by SEA and LEAs requirements and allowable activities. After providing data on homeless children and youths, the report discusses the challenges inherent in identifying these students, whose living situations are by definition in flux. The report concludes with a discussion of appropriations and whether state-level allocations correlate with the number of enrolled homeless students.

This paper studies how school spending impacts student achievement by exploiting the US interstate branching deregulation as state tax revenue shocks. Leveraging school finance data from universal school districts, our difference-in-differences estimation reveals that deregulation leads to an increase in per-pupil total revenue and expenditure. The rise in revenue is primarily attributed to higher state revenues, while the expenditure increase is more prominent in low-income school districts. Using restricted-use student assessments from the Nation's Report Card, we find that deregulation results in improved student achievement, with no distributional effects evident across students' ability, race, or free lunch status. We introduce an instrumental variables approach that accounts for dynamic treatment effects and estimate that a one-thousand-dollar increase in per-pupil spending leads to a 0.035 standard deviation improvement in student achievement.

As current trends across the country indicate widespread declining student enrollment and attendance, EdChoice is interested in how states respond. It enlisted Hanover Research to summarize publicly available information for each of the 50 U.S. states about the role enrollment plays in state funding formulas, as well as any state-level policies that may reduce the impact of declining enrollment on education funding. This report presents an analysis of the policy scan and summarizes the key findings of the policy scan including trends in education funding formulas, funding, and enrollment protections across the United States. Key findings covered in this report include: the type of education funding formulas in each state; the metrics these formulas use to measure enrollment; as well as the declining enrollment; hold harmless, and temporary provisions for enrollment and funding protections identified in the initial policy scan. This policy scan analysis is part of a series of studies that will enable EdChoice to examine the broader landscape of the impact of declining enrollment on school funding and related policies across the United States. The full version of the policy scan can be found in "How States Protect Funding for K-12 Public Schools. State Profiles Index."

Since 2020, the federal government has distributed almost $2 billion to American school districts to mitigate the effects of COVID-19 pandemic school closures. Released in three separate tranches through the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) fund, the Trump and Biden administrations outlined parameters for spending this unprecedented amount of money and ensured that most of it went directly to local school districts, with a comparative sliver going to state education agencies. This report gives an overview of the most common ESSER expenditures to date and assesses the factors that might influence whether district ESSER investments will make a difference for students. It also provides recommendations for how stakeholders should evaluate the ESSER experiment once it officially ends.

Construction and maintenance of school facilities are big cost drivers for schools, and the quality of school facilities can make a difference in student learning and health. Notably, school building construction is the second-highest capital expenditure of state and local funds, trailing only investments in infrastructure like roads. Ensuring access to safe, modern learning environments for all students is a critical and often overlooked aspect of school funding policy at the state level. A 2021 analysis estimates an annual shortfall of $85 billion in school facilities funding and recommends districts nearly double their spending on maintenance, operations, and capital construction. This brief discusses: (1) the importance of school facilities for student equity; (2) local roles in capital funding; (3) states' differing approaches to facilities funding; and (4) funding charter school facilities.

State school finance systems can play an essential role in directing additional resources to schools serving economically disadvantaged students, and research suggests that these resources can make a measurable difference in student outcomes. The vast majority of states (45) allocate some funding to districts based on their enrollment of economically disadvantaged students, though approaches differ. An earlier brief in this series, "Splitting the Bill: How Can School Finance Systems Support Students With Additional Learning Needs?," covered some principles and best practices for funding for economically disadvantaged students, along with other groups of students with additional learning needs. This brief goes even deeper into the topic.

State funding formulas shape how much money school districts have to spend, but districts usually have considerable discretion with how they distribute funds to schools. Because of this discretion, even if districts receive funds through a highly equitable state system, there is no guarantee that districts will distribute funding equitably to schools. This brief discusses district budgeting methods.

Education finance shapes what is possible in every school in the country. And finance equity is a critical step toward enabling other forms of educational equity for students who are underserved in under-resourced schools. But in too many states, the system of funding for schools remains inequitable, inadequate, and opaque to all but a few. Even in states that adhere to high-level best practices in school finance equity, funding systems can be rife with technical pitfalls or loopholes that jeopardize equity. These systems are unlikely to give schools what they need to provide an excellent education for all students. Advocates at the state and local level have a powerful role to play. While school funding systems are politically and technically difficult to change, over the past few years, advocates across the country have successfully fought for change via legislation and lawsuits. To do so effectively, advocates need a solid understanding of how school finance works in their state and how it could work better.

All states have a formula that determines how state funding is distributed to school districts. Most state formulas anticipate or require that school districts raise some funds locally and adjust state allocations based on that anticipated local share of school funding. In theory, state funding formulas attempt to provide school districts with the resources needed for a high-quality education while also accounting for differences in student populations and economic conditions from district to district, among other factors. In practice, few state formulas achieve these goals, resulting in inequitable, inadequate, and inefficient spending. To better understand these disparities, it is important to understand how state school funding formulas typically work.

Public schools receive funding from three different government sources: local, state, and federal. Local and state governments contribute the majority of funding to support public school systems, while the federal government provides a small fraction (only about 8% on average). Even with recent infusions of federal funding related to the COVID-19 pandemic, the federal share remains the smallest. Three factors determine how much funding districts receive and from which sources: (1) Property value of homes and businesses within school district boundaries; (2) How many students the school district serves and their educational needs (e.g., special education services for students with disabilities or language supports for students learning English); and (3) State policies, including if and by how much the state funding formula adjusts for differences in student population among districts and in the ability of local districts to raise funding through local taxes.

School finance equity is an essential component of educational equity. In an equitable system, public schools receive funds to provide a high-quality education for all based on the needs of students, not on the property wealth of communities. Funding inequity also disproportionately affects students of color. Districts serving the largest populations of Black, Latino, or Native American students received 16% less funding per student in state and local funding than those serving the fewest students of color.4 Achieving both adequacy and equity in school finance will not solve every educational problem, but it is a significant part of solving deeply rooted challenges.

The Collaborative Minnesota Partnerships to Advance Student Success (COMPASS), a statewide education system designed to support schools' and districts' efforts to accelerate student learning, offers professional development opportunities with various levels of support. Through COMPASS school districts and charter schools are provided a variety of resources, evidence-based practices, and facilitated guidance to support schools in areas of Literacy, Math, and School Climate and Mental Health using the Minnesota Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MnMTSS) continuous improvement framework. As part of the federally-funded Region 10 Comprehensive Center (R10CC), the Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement (CAREI) at the University of Minnesota has collaborated with the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) to develop a wealth of written resources to support implementation of MnMTSS across Minnesota schools and districts. This brief summarizes what was learned from three Minnesota school districts who participated in COMPASS cohort learning experiences. The report introduces each district and describes how their teams engaged in the cohort courses, how their participation impacted local MnMTSS development and implementation, and what lessons they learned along the way.

State education finance systems play a fundamental role in providing the resources that schools and districts need to ensure student success. But modernizing and improving these systems is often complicated and can take years. Learning from their efforts to revamp education finance systems, Bellwether has found five common conditions that pave the way to success: (1) strong, diverse coalitions; (2) willing political champions; (3) rigorous, accessible research; (4) windows of economic opportunity; and (5) valid legal challenges. This policy playbook builds from that five-condition framework and offers more concrete guidance on how advocates, policymakers, and education leaders can influence K-12 funding reform in their states. It contains guiding principles to help stakeholders identify policy priorities and opportunities. It also offers guidance on how to assess and strengthen the state's readiness for change, including a checklist of questions, potential pitfalls to avoid, and examples from other states.

We study the progressivity of state funding of school districts under Tennessee's weighted student funding formula. We propose a simple definition of progressivity based on the difference in exposure to district per-pupil funding between poor and non-poor students. The realized progressivity of district funding in Tennessee is much smaller--only about 17 percent as large--as the formula weights imply directly. The attenuation is driven by the mixing of poor and non-poor students within districts. We further show the components of the Tennessee formula not explicitly tied to student poverty are only modestly progressive. Notably, special education funding is essentially progressivity-neutral for poor students. If we adjust the formula so all factors except individual student poverty receive zero weight and distribute the excess to poor students, we can increase the progressivity of district funding by 124 percent. We interpret this as the opportunity cost of the non-poverty-based funding components, measured in terms of progressivity.

The American Rescue Plan (ARP) Act, enacted in March 2021 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, has been a lifeline for communities across the nation. The ARP Act included $122 billion to support schools through the ARP Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ARP ESSER) Fund, with a minimum of $22 billion (or 20 percent) to be spent on learning recovery strategies that respond to students' social, emotional, and academic needs, such as afterschool and summer enrichment. In this brief, the Afterschool Alliance shares findings from our analysis of more than 6,300 school districts' ARP ESSER spending plans from all 50 states and the District of Columbia, examining how ARP ESSER funds were budgeted for afterschool and summer enrichment opportunities.

Between March 2020 and March 2021, Congress allocated $189.5 billion for a new Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) Fund. The arrival of this federal aid was a lifeline for schools attempting to serve students amid the COVID-19 pandemic. This funding was distributed in a very different manner, and with very different rules and requirements, than we see with other forms of federal and state education aid. This report explores the most significant ways in which this funding differed from school districts' standard funding allocations, and what those differences can teach policymakers both about how to evaluate the ESSER investment and about how to structure and manage future school funding distributions. Our conclusions are informed by in-depth interviews with a number of district and state officials involved in administering and using ESSER dollars.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Congress created the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) fund to help support K-12 public schools in emergency situations. These funds were essential in helping schools to better adapt to students' needs. This report explains how public charter schools allocated the funds--including but not limited to--academic recovery, technology, student mental help, and family support.

Despite the contributions of their work to the learning and development of young children, child care and early education (CCEE) educators are among the lowest paid workers in the United States and have high rates of turnover in their jobs. In a pioneering effort, Washington, DC has launched the nation's first large-scale, publicly funded program to supplement CCEE educator wages. The Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity Fund (PEF) was created to achieve compensation equity with DC Public Schools teachers. This initiative, launched in Fall 2022, delivered initial lump sum payments ranging from $10,000 to $14,000 to approximately 3,000 CCEE educators across the city. This policy research brief shares findings from a study using quasi-experimental methods to examine the immediate impacts of these initial payments on CCEE employment levels in Washington, DC. The analysis uses synthetic control methods and data from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages for the period between 2019 and 2022.

Many children in GPE partner countries remain out of school or are unable to complete even primary education. This working paper aims to bring attention to the ongoing challenges of reaching universal access to education and completion of at least primary education in many GPE partner countries. [This working paper was written with support and input from Raphaelle Martinez.]

Locally-elected school boards have wide discretion over allocating money among the schools in their district, yet we know relatively little about how they decide "which schools get what." I argue that electoral incentives are one factor that can influence the distribution of resources: board members will direct spending toward schools located in neighborhoods of their district where spending will be most electorally beneficial in the next election. I test this argument using data from a discretionary school modernization program in the Los Angeles Unified School District, and find that board members distribute resources primarily to schools in competitive and moderately supportive neighborhoods, especially when running in an on-cycle election where parents make-up a larger share of the electorate and where student performance affects election outcomes. By comparison, schools in overwhelmingly opposed and supportive areas are excluded. These results suggest that local democratic control of school boards can hinder educational equality.

This paper outlines potential actions and roles for intermediaries to facilitate the development and implementation of truly equitable education-to-career pathways systems. Specifically, it could guide the broader field of intermediary organizations and efforts to engage in policy and advocacy by outlining how intermediaries can influence the design and implementation of policy solutions to address systemic inequity. Recognizing that intermediaries range widely in size, capacity, and purpose, we offer suggestions that organizations can apply wherever they sit in the policy space. The resource also highlights a set of Building Equitable Pathways (BEP) intermediaries and their work in policy and advocacy.

The mission of the National Implementation Research Network (NIRN) is to contribute to the best practices and science of implementation, organizational change, and system reinvention to improve outcomes across the spectrum of human services. As such, it has been involved in advancing implementation practice through numerous initiatives over the past 17 years. Although recognized as an implementation practice leader, NIRN has not been as consistent with its implementation research and evaluation agenda (REA). Yet, it is uniquely positioned to advance implementation research and evaluation based on the wealth of data generated through its projects. By contributing innovative practice-based research insights, demonstrating the value of implementation practice, improving the rigor of the evidence generated through practice-based research, and increasing its scholarship and policy outputs, NIRN is primed to further establish itself as a national player in implementation science. This report highlights NIRN's research and evaluation agenda.