Author: Paul T. Hill

Publisher:

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 69

ISBN-13:

This report is the final result of a six-year study of America's school finance system, including more than 30 separate studies at a cost of $6 million and involving an interdisciplinary team of more than 40 scholars including many of the country's best known economists, policy analysts, lawyers, and specialists in school finance, instruction, and educational innovation. All this work leads to one conclusion, that school finance today works against the focused and efficient use of resources to promote student learning. Recognizing the complexity and subtle nature of both the problem and the systems responsible for funding schools, the Center on Reinventing Public Education proposed a multi-year applied research and development strategy to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in the summer of 2003. The School Finance Redesign Project (SFRP) would have four goals: (1) Provide an empirical basis and policy options for redesigning the nation's K-12 school finance systems to support student performance; (2) Integrate research with state policy initiatives; (3) Educate the audiences that influence school finance policy and practice; and (4) Craft implementation tools for practitioners. This final report integrates the project's findings on the first three of these objectives. The fourth (implementation tools) is partially covered in a series of working papers commissioned by the project between 2003 and 2007 and is proposed as the major focus of follow-on work in 2008-09. Appendices include: (1) The National Working Group on Funding Student Learning; (2) Background Papers; and (3) Recommendation Comparison. (Contains 3 tables, 13 figures, and 16 footnotes.).