Education Resources Overview

This analysis examines the importance summer break has on a growing gap in mathematics proficiency between students of differing socio-economic status.

This analysis examines the importance summer break has on a growing gap in reading proficiency between students of differing socio-economic status.

Schools in the United States now spend more than $2 billion each year on education technology. But what are schools getting in return for this significant investment in technology learning? Robert Slavin examines the results from five studies designed to answer this question.

This analysis examines whether the current mechanisms for providing federal education funding to disadvantaged children are effective and whether the system works as originally intended.

This report explores some of the most financially disadvantaged school districts in the country and identifies a typology of conditions that have created or reinforced their disadvantage. It report lays out a typology of conditions that lead to severe fiscal disadvantage for local public school systems. It then provides examples of states, state policy conditions, and specific local public school districts identified as being severely financially disadvantaged.

This report begins by identifying those states where combined state and local revenues are systematically lower in higher-poverty districts–that is, states with “regressive” school funding distributions. Based on this analysis, the authors focus on six states–Illinois, Texas, New York, Pennsylvania, Missouri, and North Carolina–where children attending school in higher-poverty districts still have substantially less access to state and local revenue than children attending school in lower-poverty districts. With these states in mind, the authors then go beyond recent reports on school funding inequities to uncover some nontraditional causes of these imbalances.

The National Report Card is a critique of state school funding systems and the extent to which these systems ensure equality of educational opportunity for all children, regardless of background, family income, place of residence or school. The report makes the assumption that "fair" school funding is defined as "a state finance system that ensures equal educational opportunity by providing a sufficient level of funding distributed to districts within the state to account for additional needs generated by student poverty."

The Second Edition of the National Report Card on public school funding, Is School Funding Fair?, shows that far too many states continue to deny public schools the essential resources they need to meet the needs of the nation's 53 million students and to boost academic achievement. The National Report Card rates the 50 states on the basis of four "fairness indicators" - funding level, funding distribution, state fiscal effort, and public school coverage. The Report provides the most in-depth analysis to date of state education finance systems and school funding fairness across the nation.

The 3rd Edition of Is School Funding Fair? A National Report Card details how the Great Recession and its aftermath have affected school funding in the states. The National Report Card (NRC) examines each state's level of commitment to equal educational opportunity, regardless of a student's background, family income, or where she or he attends school. Providing fair school funding -- at a sufficient level with additional funds to meet needs generated by poverty -- is crucial if all students are to be afforded the opportunity to learn and be successful.

The focus of this essay is on which economic methods can complement and enhance impact evaluations. The authors propose the use of six domains to link intervention effectiveness to the best technique needed to determine which practice is the most cost-effective choice.

The authors discuss how to use economic techniques to evaluate educational programs and show how to apply basic cost analysis to implementation of school-wide positive behavior support (SWPBS).

This report examines the efficiency of the nation's public education system

This report analyzes two critical, and sometimes competing, issues in school finance reformer: fiscal equity and fiscal efficiency. It makes the case that fiscal equity and fiscal effectiveness are not mutually exclusive, and this nation needs to do more to improve both the fairness and the productivity of public school dollars. In other words, we need to make sure that schools and districts not only get enough money to serve their student populations but also that they then spend those dollars wisely.

This paper examines critical issues that must be considered to maximize the positive impact of big data and minimize negative effects that are currently encountered in other domains. This review is designed to raise awareness of these issues with particular attention paid to implications for educational research design in order that educators can develop the necessary policies and practices to address this complex phenomenon and its possible implications in the field of education. 

This paper provides a guide to statistically based methods for estimating the extra costs of educating disadvantaged students, shows how these methods are related, and compares state aid programs that account for these costs in different ways. It shows that large, urban school districts with a high concentration of disadvantaged students would receive far more aid (and rich suburban districts would receive far less aid) if statistically based pupil weights were used instead of the ad hoc weights in existing state aid programs.

This report: (1) investigates the declining state of the educational system in America, as measured by high school student performance in the United States and other countries; (2) identifies specific problem areas; and (3) offers multiple recommendations for improvement

The purpose of this report is to introduce new data through tables containing descriptive information, such as totals, averages, and percentages. The findings presented here demonstrate the range of information available through IPEDS; they include only a sample of the information collected and are not meant to emphasize any particular issue. While only a small amount of the data included in the spring 2017 collection are displayed in this

This report examines the widespread and unjust district budgeting practices and offers Congress a straightforward legislative path: Fix the so-called comparability provisions of Title I.

This report fills an important gap in the literature on school leadership by presenting an approach for understanding the resources and expenditures associated with efforts to prepare, hire, evaluate, develop, and support school leaders and by presenting estimates of those resources and expenditures. 

This report highlights the lack of innovation, flexibility, and new ideas in state financing of public education. It concludes: many state and education leaders continue to support and employ methods that prevent schools and principals from undertaking the efforts that they think are most needed to improve education in their classrooms. The use of state categorical–funds to school districts with strict limits on their use–exemplifies this lack of innovation in school finance.

This article provides a summary of measuring the fiscal impact of practices in education
educational policy.

This report examines the current available state remedies for inequity; examine the Equity and Excellence Commission’s findings regarding the inequities that exist in U.S. educa�tion and its five-part agenda to address them; and conclude with recommendations designed to operationalize that agenda and make equal educational opportunity a reality for each and every child in the United States.

This paper provides the history and summarizes the development of the Campbell Collaboration. The Campbell Collaboration is a “nonprofit organization with the mission of helping people make well-informed decisions about the effects of interventions in the social, behavioral, and educational domains. The paper looks at the organization’s efforts to build a world library of accurate, synthesized evidence to inform policy and practice and improve human well-being worldwide. The Education section of the Campbell research library produces reviews on issues in early childhood, elementary, secondary, and postsecondary education. Topics range from academic programs, teacher qualifications, testing, to a wide variety of school-based interventions. Campbell systematic reviews and related evidence synthesis provide unbiased summaries of bodies of empirical evidence. 

This report examines how local school district funding is allocated in a way that hurts poor and minority students. The four papers include: (1) the history of Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and its comparability provision, (2) the unexpected consequences of the comparability provision in practice, (3) the ways in which Title I might be fixed, and (4) the ways in which those fixes might be implemented with positive results.

This annual publication is one of the best ongoing sources for tracking and analyzing important developments and trends in education over time using the latest available data. In 2019 the spotlights were on: “Early Childhood Care Arrangements”; “Choices and Costs Characteristics of Public School Teachers Who Completed Alternative Route to Certification Programs”; and “Trends in Student Loan Debt for Graduate School Completers.”

This special CEP report highlights findings about the critical element of school climate from case studies of the first year and half of SIG implementation in Maryland, Michigan, and Idaho.

This study provides evidence that student-weighted allocation can be a means toward greater resource equity among schools within districts. Resource equity is defined here in per-pupil needs-weighted fiscal terms.

The authors trace the district's process of moving to a system of student-based budgeting:
funding children rather than staff members and weighting the funding according to schools'
and students' needs.

This paper addresses one key driver of spending variation between schools: shared district resources.

This report analyzes funding inequities in the context of four formulas that determine the amounts and destinations of grants under Title I, Part A. States with small populations and low concentrations of poor children receive radically larger grants on a per-poor-child basis than states with larger populations, including those with substantial rural poverty. Children living in concentrated poverty are poorly served by a labyrinthine funding scheme comprising four separate formulas. This paper exposes the technical considerations that should inform a smarter, fairer approach to funding grants under Title I, Part A

This analysis provides an overview of funding equity by race and poverty concentration across states the funding disparities across the nation and within states. It finds that nationally, the highest poverty districts receive about $1,200 less per student than the lowest poverty districts. The differences are even larger–roughly $2,000 per student–among districts serving the most and the fewest students of color.

US President Obama has launched one of the world’s most ambitious education reform agendas. Under the heading “Race to the Top”, this agenda encourages US states to adopt internationally benchmarked standards and assessments that prepare students for success in college and the workplace: recruit, develop, reward, and retain effective teachers and principals. 

This report analyzes the disparity in funding and resources in K-12 education for children of color and low-income families. It found that millions of students–largely low-income students and students of color–continue to attend segregated and economically isolated schools. State and district school finance systems perpetuate and compound these inequities by providing less money to students with the greatest need.

Governor Brown has proposed a new funding system–known as a weighted pupil formula–that would direct more revenue to California school districts serving many economically disadvantaged students. This report examines the relationship between funding and student disadvantage and addresses questions about converting the current school finance system to a weighted pupil formula.

The authors use research-based "impact modeling" to show how a strategic approach to recruiting and supporting rookie teachers could yield as much as 4.2 extra months of student learning. We provide 5 recommendations for school systems to leverage their investment in structures that provide rookie teachers with both shelter and development.

This paper focuses on one aspect of district spending ambiguity, namely, differences in per-pupil spending masked by teacher salary cost averaging. 

This study shows that the overuse of suspensions in California schools is harming student achievement and graduation rates, and resulting in billions of dollars in economic damage. The study quantifies the financial consequences of school suspensions down to the district level, reporting both the additional costs borne by taxpayers as a result of suspensions and the economic benefit lost to the state. 

This essay seeks to help you put the hard-earned experience of others to use through a set of practical steps, prompts, and tips for matching the right evaluator to your need.

This paper examines the issue of education equity by analyzing per-pupil state and local education spending. Using U.S. Department of Education school-level expenditure data that includes real teacher salaries, the paper concludes: (1) Students of color are being shortchanged across the country when compared to their white peers. (2) The traditional explanation–that variation in schools’ per-pupil spending stems almost entirely from different property-tax bases between school districts–is inaccurate as approximately 40 percent of variation in per-pupil spending occurs within school districts. (3) Changing a particular provision of federal education law–closing the so-called comparability loophole–would result in districts making more equitable expenditures on students of color.

Despite New York’s wrong turn, the $6 billion for Reading First has more generally been one of the best investments ever in federal education spending. It has already brought some remarkable reading breakthroughs in many parts of the country and among at-risk students.

This chapter addresses the development of local norms; that is, norms that represent students from a particular educational system. Specifically, this chapter focuses on developing academic local norms for educational problem solving. 

This report analyzes the inequities of the current school finance models and proposes adoption of a model called Weighted Student Funding. It is a system of school funding based on five principles: (1) Funding should follow the child, on a per-student basis, to the public school that he/she attends; (2) Per-student funding should vary according to the child's need and other relevant circumstances; (3) It should arrive at the school as real dollars (4) These principles for allocating money to schools should apply to all levels; and (5) Funding systems should be simplified and made transparent.

Presented are 12 author contributed chapters which developed out of an invisible college of leaders concerned with providing services to the severely, profoundly, and multiply handicappe

The U.S. Department of Education Office of Educational Technology created this guide to assist software developers, startups and entrepreneurs in gaining specialized knowledge and is designed to help apply technology in smart ways to solve persistent problems in education.

This study compares the effect size and return on investment for rapid assessment, between, increased spending, voucher programs, charter schools, and increased accountability.

This article compares the relative cost-effectiveness of the five policies, using best-evidence estimates drawn from available data regarding the effectiveness and costs of rapid assessment, increased spending, voucher programs, charter schools, and accountability, using a conservative methodology for calculating the relative effectiveness of the rapid assessment.

The organization promotes well-informed decision making by preparing, maintaining and disseminating systematic reviews in education, crime and justice, social welfare and international development.

The Council’s mission is to promote the cause of urban schools and to advocate for inner-city students through legislation, research and media relations.