Marguerite Roza, Ph.D., is Research Professor and Director of the Edunomics Lab (Edunomicslab.org), a research center focused on exploring and modeling education finance policy and practice. She leads the McCourt School of Public Policy’s Certificate in Education Finance, which equips participants with practical skills in strategic fiscal management, finance policy analysis, and financial leadership.
Dr. Roza’s research traces the effects of fiscal policies at the federal, state, and district levels for their implications on resources at the school and classroom levels. Her calculations of dollar implications and cost-equivalent trade-offs have prompted changes in education finance policy at all levels in the education system.
Dr. Roza has led projects on state and school district finance policy, financial equity, pensions, compensation, higher education finance, and other related topics, including the Institute for Education Sciences multi-year study of weighted student funding, the Finance and Productivity Initiative at the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), and the Schools in Crisis Rapid Response Paper Series. She led the creation of several newly available financial datasets and data visualizations, including NERD$ (producing school-by-school spending on every US public school), the ESSER Expenditure Dashboard, and ROI scatterplots. These freely accessible resources have been used extensively across the field by researchers, education leaders, advocates, and journalists to bring transparency to how funds are used, and to inform financial decision-making.
When the Chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, Lamar Alexander (R-TN), recently released a draft bill to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (otherwise known as the No Child Left Behind Act), reaction was swift.
Suzanne Simburg and Marguerite Roza lay out the cost savings possible if blended learning were adopted by all U.S. public elementary schools, not just charter schools.
Consideration of whether smaller classes are preferable to larger ones requires some recognition of the opportunity costs involved. This brief provides a state-by-state context by computing the dollars at stake in marginally raising the number of students per class.
Using wage and staffing data from states, this paper projects the financial and staffing implications of one innovative school model (the Rocketship lab rotation) to highlight potential impacts on the schooling workforce and total per-student spending.
This working paper examines how state finance policies that protect districts from declining or low enrollments drive up spending and inhibit adaptation.
This brief describes how a different method of supplying benefits to employees might work for districts: cafeteria plans. While typical school district plans offer a one-size-fits-all package of benefits to employees, cafeteria plans allow employees to customize their benefits within a given cost.
Looking at the 15 largest districts in California, this analysis finds that teachers at risk of layoff are concentrated in schools with more poor and minority students, concluding that “last in, first out” policies disproportionately affect these students and their schools.
It’s true that teacher salaries make up the largest slice of the district budget pie, but salary costs can be cut without layoffs. Rather than handing out pink slips, some districts have explored rolling back salaries.
An estimated 60%–80% of the more than $500 billion per year spent operating the nation’s public schools goes directly to paying and supporting school employees. Much of the money is directed to basic teacher salary costs. The problem for many locales, however, is that wages are often decided many years in advance, via collective bargaining agreements. In contrast, decisions about how to close budget gaps get made just ahead of the affected school year as revenue projections are finalized. Sometimes in closing gaps, district leaders treat salary decisions made years ago as immovable (which they are not) and focus only on furloughs and layoffs.
This Rapid Response brief demonstrates the effect on wages, layoffs, and class sizes of a range of policy options available to districts forced to cut salary expenditures.
This analysis shows that school districts faced with large budget gaps could avoid some or all teacher layoffs by rolling back salaries.
This analysis argues that in the current fiscal climate, districts should rethink automatically paying teachers for master’s degrees, and consider how money could instead be channeled into compensation in ways that lead to improved student performance.
In this brief, Marguerite Roza explains why K-12 school districts that lay off personnel according to seniority cause disproportionate damage to their programs and students than if layoffs were determined on a seniority-neutral basis.
This report is the conclusion of an extensive six-year national study funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The authors criticize school finance systems for being outmoded and not linked to student results and offer a four-part action plan for overhauling today’s school finance systems.
This is a pre-print version of an article that was published in ASBO International’s School Business Affairs magazine. The article summarizes a five year research study that examined the linkages between how money is spent on K-12 education and whether students learn.
This report demonstrates in greater detail than ever before how America’s methods of school finance work against a single-minded focus on student learning.
This paper explores the nature of micro-budgeting decisions and shows how they support or hamper district reform strategies. It also provides a framework to help district leaders recognize different kinds of allocations.