Have States Disproportionately Cut Education Budgets During ARRA? Early Findings
This analysis explores how state education spending has changed or will change given the application of the State Fiscal Stabilization Fund.
Hopes, Fears, & Reality: A Balanced Look at American Charter Schools in 2009
This edition of Hopes, Fears, & Reality explores the lessons high-performing charter schools offer for other public schools, including the alignment of lesson content with state curriculum, frequent formative assessment mirroring high-stakes tests, and the importance of a school culture that exudes “a palpable urgency that communicates that the work is important.”
Charter High Schools: Alternative Paths to Graduation
This white paper explores the alternative path to graduation that charter high schools make possible.
Portfolio School Districts for Big Cities: An Interim Report
Study on four urban school districts experimenting with new school designs and new ways of holding schools accountable for performance by implementing a “portfolio strategy.”
Performance Management in Portfolio School Districts
As portfolio districts take on duties they were not designed for, this report offers guidance on how to manage some of the most complicated tasks.
Separation of Degrees: State-By-State Analysis of Teacher Compensation for Master’s Degrees
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.
Drivers of Choice: Parents, Transportation, and School Choice
This report surveys the broad transportation landscape and conducts in-depth work with families in two cities to determine what role transportation plays in parents’ school decisions, and how districts might address related issues.
Facing huge budget gaps, are school district officials forced to lay off teachers?
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.
Custom Tailored: Trends in Charter School Educational Programs
This research brief analyzes detailed descriptions of charter school educational programs to better understand how these schools tailor their programs to meet their students’ needs.
Ranking the States: Federal Education Stimulus Money and the Prospects for Reform
This brief presents rank order projections of changes in state K-12 education spending amidst state revenue gaps and the addition of ARRA funds.
