Search

Education has become a high-stakes, big-budget item worldwide and is often a major contributor to the country's GDP. Each country's public expenditure on education differs but there is a general recognition that education is a catalyst for country growth and development. In Lebanon, public sector education is viewed by the government as unproductive and the gap between private and public schooling is vast. The strong centralization and governance of Lebanese public schools' finance, management, and curriculum hinders the development of the public education sector and influences the performance of students and teachers. Although the total expenditure on education is high (about US$1.2 billion annually: approximately 2.45% of GDP and 6.4% of total public expenditure), Lebanon's public expenditure on education is lower than expenditure by its neighbors. This study used an interpretive document analysis method to analyze the design of the public budget policy used to determine the allocation of funds to the Lebanese education sector's development plan for the educational section. The study determined the uniform guidelines for the education's budget design by comparing the design used by Finland with that of 33 other developing countries. Analysis of results found that the Lebanese public education development plan uses six of eight best-practice guidelines. This study is potentially useful for educational policymakers and researchers interested in educational budget policies design in low performing systems. Comparative document analysis will assist policymakers in Lebanon to follow bench-marked guidelines in resource allocation to improve the quality of education.

Universities face inherent informational asymmetries. These make university budgeting prone to various challenges including moral hazard. The last forty years has seen some large research- intensive universities move from centralized incremental budgeting to decentralized Responsibility Center Budgeting (RCB). It is assumed that a faculty chooses a level of costly effort in generating revenue for the university. The level of faculty effort is not observable by the central administration. When there is no revenue uncertainty or when the faculty is not risk averse, pure RCB is best from the perspective of the administration. The intuition is that pure RCB fully aligns financial responsibility with academic authority, that is, it makes the faculty the residual claimant. Once the faculty is risk averse, partial RCB is optimal. Partial RCB provides a balance between providing the right incentives to the faculty and the university reducing the revenue risk faced by the faculty.

The purpose of this study is to describe the actions taken by college students to face their future retirement. For this, the test designed by the National Commission for the Protection and Defense of Financial Services Users (CONDUSEF) in Mexico was used, which has items related to financial knowledge, specifically topics about savings, emergency funds and life insurance, among others. The instrument was applied to 60 UPAV college students of different levels, during the school cycle of February-August 2018, in the city of Xalapa, Veracruz; it should be noted that the range of age was older than 21 but younger than 23 years old. The descriptive analysis showed results that lead us to believe that students have emergency funds (53%) but these are used to face unexpected situations (59%); also, students do not have life insurance, which could be concerning in their personal and family life if/when they have to face a present or future illness. Regarding car insurance, most of the respondents stated that they do not own one, besides considering it an unnecessary expense. One of the study limitations was the surveyed population; hence the need to widen this research to encompass more students from such geographical area in order to obtain a wider outlook of said behavior.

This study aims to improve the management of Islamic Study Group ("Majelis Ta'lim") in Special Capital Region of Jakarta (DKI Jakarta). The research employed qualitative research with a case study approach. The study was conducted at Jamiyyatul Ummahat Majelis Ta'lim (the name of Islamic Study Group) and four people participated in this study, namely 1) head of the majelis ta'lim, 2) staff of the majelis ta'lim, 3) the teacher, 4) the member. Data collection involved observation, interview, documentation, and triangulation. Data were analyzed using Miles & Huberman's Interactive Model. The results of the study showed that the management of the Jamiyyatul Ummahat Majelis (the name of Islamic Study Group had been developed in terms of its modernization in the learning management, improvement of human resources, as well as the management of financial systems and infrastructures. It also focused itself on the level of quality achievement gradually and sustainably. The results also underline that the modernization occurred because of several factors, including the management function in the administration of the majelis ta'lim and the educational level improvement of human resources. The leaders and administrators of majelis ta'lim were elementary school graduates, but now 75% of them hold an undergraduate degree. Thus, the improvement of education leads to better and more modern management.

In order to fully appreciate the interdisciplinary nature of energy resources, there is a need to understand pertinent issues from other viewpoints besides a purely chemistry perspective. In this paper, the teaching of cost-benefit analysis (CBA) and business databases as part of CM4282: Energy Resources at the Department of Chemistry, National University of Singapore (NUS), is described. For teaching of CBA, in two 1h sessions, topics such as net present value (NPV), internal rate of return (IRR), discount rate, payback period, and sensitivity analysis were introduced in the context of capital budgeting. With collaboration from NUS libraries, in another 1h session, students were instructed on searching business databases for conducting strength, weakness, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) analysis as part of their end-of-semester group presentation. Exposure to CBA and business databases enables chemistry majors in CM4282 to understand energy resources in an interdisciplinary light and enables the application of classroom knowledge to real-life scenarios in energy resources.

In 2011, Virginia's General Assembly enacted legislation that required one credit in a stand-alone personal finance course for graduating students. Subsequently, the Virginia Department of Education developed Standards of Learning (SOLs) for Personal Finance and Economics (Code of Virginia §22.1-200-03B), which included a focus on personal financial literacy skills and decision making. Around the same time, many credit unions (CUs) were realizing attrition as their memberships aged. Schools' need to fulfill state-required SOLs and credit unions' need to acquire a new generation of members lead to an organic emergence of symbiotic relationships between financial institutions and local high schools. With state Banking-in-Schools guidance and the Work-Based Learning component of Career Technical Education (CTE), partnerships with credit unions made sense as they're not-for-profit financial cooperatives. And rather than simply providing financial education tools to schools or hosting member drives at student events, many credit unions decided to supply hands-on learning and a convenient place for students, teachers, and staff to bank by opening in-school Student-Run Credit Union branches.

In the wake of the 2007 housing crash and subsequent economic recession, state legislatures across the country faced substantial declines in revenues, and by 2011, for the first time in more than a decade, average spending on education declined. However, states' budgetary responses to the Great Recession were decidedly uneven, with some making lasting cuts to public education. This article uses longitudinal data on state-level educational spending, politics, demographics, economic well-being, and a unique set of union strength indicators to assess the strength of teachers' unions as advocates for education spending by examining their role in states' varied budgetary responses to the Great Recession. We find that states with laws prohibiting collective bargaining for teachers and states with lower union dues per teacher made substantially larger cuts to overall educational expenditures, even after controlling for time-invariant state characteristics, secular trends, and an extensive set of time-variant state-level covariates.

Consumers with low income in the United States have higher vulnerability to unhealthy diets compared with the general population. Although some literature speculates that scarcity is an explanation for this disparity, empirical evidence is lacking. We conducted a qualitative study of food choice to explore whether scarcity-related phenomena, such as tunneling and bandwidth tax, may contribute to unhealthy dietary choices. We used participant-driven photo elicitation (n = 18) to investigate the food choice behaviors of individuals living in the greater Boston area who met the federal guidelines for poverty. Participants took photos at the point of food acquisition for 1 month, after which we interviewed them using a semistructured interview guide with the photos as prompts. Thematic coding was used for analysis. Respondents had relative time abundance. Two major themes emerged: participants used a set of strategies to stretch their budgets, and they highly prioritized cost and preference when making food choices. The extreme focus on obtaining food at low cost, which required time and effort, was suggestive of tunneling. We found no evidence of the bandwidth tax. Our findings raise the hypothesis of scarcity as a continuum: when individuals experience multiple resource constraints, they experience scarcity; whereas people with very limited finances and relative time abundance may instead be in a prescarcity condition, with a hyperfocus on a scarce resource that could lead to tunneling as constraints increase. Additional studies are needed to understand whether and how tunneling and bandwidth tax emerge, independently or together, as people face different levels and types of scarcity.

This study provides an update on the major topics covered in the required, core public budgeting and financial management courses offered by NASPAA accredited programs in the U.S. and explores how NASPAA competencies are addressed in these courses. Based on a survey of 39 NASPAA accredited programs and a content analysis of 60 course syllabi, this study finds that public budgeting and financial management courses still focus on budgeting, which has not changed since the 1980s. In addition, with no curricular guidelines to benchmark the public budgeting and financial management curriculum, programs are left to interpret and assess NASPAA competencies in their courses and there is a significant variation in how they are assessed. The study concludes with a call for more research on budgeting and financial management education.

In response to growing concerns over school violence, crime, and safety, schools continue to implement school crime prevention and reduction policies and programs. Aside from the increased demands on school budgets imposed by new and enhanced school safety programs, two additional factors further complicate matters. First, just as schools vary in terms of their violence and crime prevention programmatic needs, schools (and districts) also vary in terms of their financial needs and health. Second, schools similarly vary in the magnitude of financial tradeoffs incident to school administrators' reconciling competing claims for school crime prevention programs and other demands on an exhaustible supply of school funds. Exploiting the nation's leading data set on public school crime and safety, the U.S. Department of Education's 2017-18 School Survey on Crime and Safety ("SSOCS"), supplemented by district-level current per pupil spending data, we explore variation in school administrators' views about the nature of the compromise between school safety and other budgetary claims. Our core findings imply that variation in student per pupil spending as well as perceived litigation exposure persistently informed administrators' reports about the inadequacy of school funding and how it limits school crime prevention and reduction efforts. That school finance trade-offs implicate school crime prevention programs reinforce the broader point that school finance issues implicate a suite of factors that extend beyond student academic achievement and other traditional outcomes and into school crime, violence, and safety domains.

The purpose of this article is to provide insight into the perceptions of college presidents on their role in budgeting and finance. While most of the past research in this area has focused on how to engage and understand budget and finance practices, this chapter sought to highlight the perceptions of the roles of those involved in the process, namely presidents.

Higher education scholars often investigate the policy mechanisms of external accountability, but rarely explore institutional mechanisms of internal accountability. This chapter, which reports select findings from an in-depth case study of institutional budgeting at an American public research university, examines an underexplored mechanism of internal accountability -- annual budget reviews. The findings illustrate that the university's budget review often constitutes a fantasy practice that affirms the institution's commitment to fiscal prudence as much as scrutinizes budgetary decisions in academic units. The findings reveal opportunities to strengthen budget reviews at institutions that have adopted decentralized budget models such as Responsibility Center Budgeting.

This paper reports on a case study that explores how the integrative model of program planning can be applied to better understand the process of mobile learning efforts in diverse African contexts. The authors discuss how, Scientific Animations Without Borders (SAWBO), a Purdue University-based program, creates educational videos accessible in over 220 languages and disseminates them for use on a diversity of electronic platforms, inclusive of but not limited to cell phones. The authors aim to advance important discussions related to how human resource development research and practice can be responsive to local communities while working to enhance agricultural productivity and gender equity in the Global South.

In this paper, we employ Punctuated Equilibrium Theory to consider institutions' shifting goals, priorities, and constraints, and to explore the nature of change at colleges and universities in the United States. By exploiting annual changes in institutional budget decisions over a 29-year period, we seek to understand the extent to which institutions exhibit patterns of punctuated equilibrium, which are characterized by long periods of relative equilibrium (stasis) and of occasional extreme changes (punctuations). Broadly, we find that institutions of higher education allocate funds in a pattern characteristic of Punctuated Equilibrium, and that certain types of institutions are more likely than others to exhibit this pattern. Taken in whole, this paper calls into question a prevailing perspective on change in higher education -- that change is slow-moving, moderate, and incremental. Instead, we posit that a framework of Punctuated Equilibrium may better describe how researchers and practitioners should consider institutional change within higher education.

The Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act passed by Congress in 2020 included significant aid to state education systems. These included direct aid to K-12 districts and higher education institutions, and funds to be used at the discretion of Governors through the Governor's Emergency Education Relief Fund (GEER). We examine the factors influencing where and how GEER funding was distributed across state K-12 systems and what inequities were introduced in its spending. Using a mixed methods analysis of state GEER spending plans and district-level finance data, we focus specifically on how distribution sought to target schools serving disadvantaged student groups. We find that several state leaders decided to send their GEER funds to school districts via funding formulas, and that some Governors made decisions to direct their GEER funds towards certain student groups. State spending patterns were not strongly related to governor political ideology or the states' existing funding formulas or inter-district resource allocation patterns. We discuss the implications of this policy related to two state case examples, California and New York, and provide insight for future education stimulus funding proposals.

The intention of this paper is to add to existing knowledge of how building-level spending is prioritized toward horizontal and vertical equity during severe economic downturns. Using a sample of all public schools in Texas during the Great Recession, we examine how schools undergoing the greatest spending reductions reallocated their spending on academic programs. Results demonstrate that schools undergoing financial shocks respond mainly by reapportioning regular, accelerated, and special education spending, rather than simply enacting across-the-board cuts. High-poverty, low-performing, and urban schools tended to prioritize reallocations toward targeted group support, while lower poverty, higher performing, suburban schools tended to prioritize reallocations toward regular education support. Furthermore, results of fixed and random effect regression models suggest that while spending allocations are in part determined by district-level characteristics, reactionary changes to spending are more explained by school or leadership characteristics. These results support the notion that site-level budgeting is an important factor in ensuring that spending is calibrated to current student needs when undergoing periods of financial uncertainty.

I examine the student-achievement implications of school-level budgetary autonomy in public schools. I propose a theoretical model of a principal's allocation decisions and empirically examine determinants of participation and the resulting impacts on student achievement. A principal's years of administrative experience positively impact program participation both for middle schools and elementary schools. In elementary schools, estimates show that increased autonomy improves both math and reading scores. Autonomous elementary schools with a high percentage of free and reduced lunch eligible students also appear to have a greater ability to improve test scores.

Community college students are experiencing food insecurity at high rates, and students with children are especially vulnerable with as many as 67% being food insecure. To understand food access in certain populations, previous research has examined the food shopping strategies implemented by families to manage a tight budget. In this study we employ a qualitative method to understand food access among parenting community college students, as no studies to date have explored their experiences. We used general qualitative inquiry to document the strategies students implemented to meet their food needs. We conducted interviews with community college students with at least one dependent child (N = 18). Participants were asked about shopping strategies and food choices when on a tight food budget. Interviews were recorded and transcribed. Three themes emerged related to the strategies used to manage tight household budgets. First, students reported shopping at multiple food stores to find the best prices. Second, they adjusted food budgets based on overall household expenses. Third, they only purchased foods that would be eaten by their children to meet food preferences. Interview results highlighted student adaptability and ingenuity, yet students often had to juggle competing factors and purchased less of certain foods to stay within their budget. Community colleges should provide programming to increase food access to improve student retention and completion rates. In addition to creating campus-based programs, institutions can work with local organizations to connect students to resources (e.g., food pantries) to provide students with additional support.

In rural Appalachian communities of southeast Ohio, where generational poverty is high, communities and schools worked together to both create meaningful learning experiences and ensure that basic needs were met before students started the school year. Families of students who attended Summer Advantage--a 21-day summer school program for kindergarten through high school students living in an area marked by rural poverty--had an opportunity to learn more about financial literacy as they acquired materials they needed to get students ready for school. This experience offered insight about teaching economics and engaging families with the schools.

State budgets temporarily crashed amid the COVID-19 pandemic and economic shutdown, placing education funding at risk. To demonstrate implications for school finance, we show that (1) school districts are racially segregated along class lines; (2) higher-poverty districts receive a greater share of funds from state, as opposed to local sources, making them especially vulnerable during economic downturns; and (3) many states made across-the-board K-12 budget reductions following the Great Recession, but those cuts disproportionately impacted high-poverty districts. A decade later, state legislators may face similar fiscal challenges. Instead of enacting across-the-board cuts, states can identify specific funding programs that already benefit lower-poverty districts or wealthier students. We demonstrate how this approach would work under different state finance models and offer recommendations for state policy makers.

The purpose of this study was to analyze the high school curriculum and instruction per pupil allocation and the effect on the Algebra I and English I State Assessment of Academic Readiness (STAAR) End of Course (EOC) scores. A mixed Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) was used to find if the high school curriculum and instruction per pupil allocation makes a difference on Algebra I and English I STAAR EOC scores. The Accountability Rating Index report was used to select 40 secondary campuses based on 2014-2015 STAAR EOC scores. The mixed ANOVA considered Algebra I and English I STAAR EOC scores for the 2013-2014 school year, 2014-2015 school year, and 2015-2016 school year, and the per pupil allocation by high schools for curriculum and instruction budget. The results from this research study showed that there was not a significant difference among low, medium, and high levels of curriculum and instruction per pupil allocation over three years (2013-2014, 2014-2015, and 2015-2016) on Algebra I and English I STAAR EOC scores at low SES high schools in Texas. In addition, research results indicated that it appears that not enough money is provided to low SES high school campuses in the state of Texas to guarantee student success in Algebra I and English I STAAR EOC scores.

The origins of innovation is the ability to identify global trends and to assess their relevance for development. The first area of mapping could include a better understanding of these trends in higher education and innovation around the world. The purpose of the study was to examine the effect of mission and vision on organizational performance in private universities in Kenya. The specific research question is how do mission and vision affect organization performance in private universities in Kenya? This was a correlational study which adopted a positivist philosophy. The study population comprised of all the 17 private universities in Kenya accredited by Commission of University Education. Th? unit of ?n?lysis w?s th? board of directors, vic? ch?nc?llors, h??ds of d?p?rtm?nts (fin?nc?, sports, hum?n r?sourc?, r?s??rch, qu?lity ?ssur?nc?) ?nd ?c?d?mic d??ns (busin?ss school) which w?s 136. ? c?nsus t?chniqu? w?s us?d in the study with frequency distributions, percentages ?nd m??ns for d?scriptiv? st?tistic?l ?n?lysis whil? corr?l?tions ?nd r?gr?ssion ?n?lyses w?r? us?d for inf?r?nti?l statistics. The study found that, mission and vision explained a significant proportion of variance in organizational performance, R[superscript 2]= 0.633. Th? signific?nc? v?lu? in t?sting th? r?li?bility of th? mod?l for th? r?l?tionship b?tw??n Mission ?nd Vision on org?niz?tion?l p?rform?nc? w?s F(1, 122) = 208.929, p = 0.00. Th?r?for?, the model was found to be statistically significant in predicting the r?l?tionship b?tw??n th? study v?ri?bl?s. The study found that for every unit change in mission ?nd vision, org?niz?tion?l p?rform?nc? incr??s?s by 0.867 h?nc? implying ? positive impact of mission and vision on org?niz?tion?l p?rform?nc?. B?s?d on th? findings, th? study conclud?d th?t th?r? w?s ? signific?nt r?l?tionship b?tw??n ?ll th? ind?p?nd?nt v?ri?bl?s ?nd org?niz?tion?l p?rform?nc? the dependent variable. Th? study ?lso conclud?d th?t policy ?nd r?gul?tion positiv?ly mod?r?t?d th? r?l?tionship b?tw??n mission and vision ?nd org?niz?tion?l p?rform?nc?.

Research studies on financial management in South African public schools expands recurrent literature, most of which have largely pathologised school leadership and management, and rural schools in particular. This article instead draws from a qualitative case study of success, which examined how five novice principals in a rural setting went beyond the prescriptive administrative requirements to generate context-responsive and creative ways of managing school finances, working with the parent community, with educational peers and the departmental policies to activate situated relevant governance relations. The data is drawn from interviews and documents produced within the setting. Our findings reveal a new set of accountability relations, which counter the hierarchical relations between schools and the community, or between the department and the rural context. These principals began a trajectory of overt training in financial management to ensure their own and collaborating participants' clarity and involvement in a participative management approach. Whilst the school-formulated policies serve as a backdrop to the terms of operations, these principals generate multiple accountabilities in their role as chief financial officers. The study recognises vertical, horizontal and downward accountabilities, which are underpinned by self-driven motivation, moral integrity and social developmental responsibilities. Rather than being a pathological problem, school financial management offers policy and practice potential to develop co-responsible governance.

This paper focuses on the development and implementation of the Institutional Assessment Plan through integrated processes in which the assessment informs the decisions on budgetary matters and resource allocation. One of the key challenges in developing and implementing an institutional assessment plan is that often the decisions at the micro, macro, and institutional level are not fully connected. For example, a request from department X for a faculty line (a micro-level decision/request) may have little or no influence on the decision made by the President/Cabinet that the institution will conduct Y searches in the next year (an institutional level decision). We address the issue of the disconnect between the decisions at the micro, macro, and institutional levels by developing an integrated processes model. That results in executing the assessment plan through integrated goals and an integrated action plan that minimizes duplication of effort and improves efficiency.

Like all organisations, good governance is a fundamental requirement for the responsible and accountable management of universities in general and open universities in particular. This is to ensure that these (open) universities remain relevant to their mission of facilitating unfettered access to higher education for citizens and at the same time continue being reliable contributors to personal and institutional developments, the vital ingredients to maintaining sustained national development. While several studies have, in the past, been conducted on governance of universities, almost all of them have centred around conventional, face-to-face institutions. Not much published literature is in evidence on the governance of Open Universities. This paper, drawing from a study on the governance of a few open universities in Asia, tries to discuss the nature of their challenges, and the lessons that can be drawn from their practices and experience. The study focused on aspects relating to institutional autonomies such as curriculum, budgeting and financial management, admission standards, conferment of qualifications, academic staff appointments, development and promotions and research policies. Our findings indicate that, similar to conventional systems, the state plays a crucial role in many aspects of governance both in publicly funded and privately supported institutions. Recent attempts at governance transformation towards greater institutional autonomies is beginning to show limited changes in some but not all jurisdictions studied.