| Ross Rubenstein
Georgia State University
The equity of public elementary and secondary school districts in the U.S. 1992-95
FINAL REPORT:
This study takes advantage of recently released national data sets to examine the equity of education funding across school districts in 49 states for fiscal years 1992 and 1995. It presents rankings of each state's funding equity and explores factors that may be related to the level of equity within states and to changes across years. Results of such analyses would provide an important national status report and assessment of trends regarding funding equity, and could help inform political discussions in states that are interested in adjusting state funding policies to improve equity.
All revenue and enrollment data come from the Common Core of Data for the 1991-92 and 1994-95 school years. The analyses will measure the dispersion of combined state and local revenues by district for all states. Revenue variables will be adjusted to reflect cost-of-education differences across districts. To account for differences in student needs by district, this study will weight students according to their special needs. These analyses will result in four sets of equity measures for each state: 1) unadjusted for cost and student needs difference; 2) adjusted for cost but not student needs; 3) adjusted for student needs but not cost; 4) adjusted for both student needs and cost differences. Univariate dispersion measures will be used to analyze horizontal equity, while multivariate analyses wil be used to examine factors related to revenue disparities.
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