For decades, advocates for school finance reform have focused their attention on a single statistic: the average amount school districts spend on each of their students. That figure, however, can mask large disparities in what districts spend across each of their schools – disparities concealed by how districts typically manage and report on their budgets.
That situation is poised to change, thanks to a “sleeper provision” of the federal Every Student Succeeds Act that. As of December 2018, school districts nationwide will be required to report exactly what they spend on each of their schools. Will that information kick off a new wave of school finance research and reform? Could it become one of the law’s most important legacies?
In this week’s episode of the podcast, EdNext editor-in-chief Marty West talks with Marguerite Roza about this change, which she wrote about in a recent post on the EdNext blog entitled “With New Data, School Finance is Coming out of the Dark Ages.”
Roza, a research professor at Georgetown University and director of its Edunomics Lab. is the author of the influential 2010 book, Educational Economics: Where do School Funds Go?
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