At CRPE, our previous finance research centered on how funding systems could support the growth of charter schools and portfolio-style governance, with a strong emphasis on equity, transparency, and flexibility in resource allocation. We examined how traditional formulas often disadvantaged schools of choice and studied weighted or student-based funding models that might better match dollars to student needs.
Today, our focus has shifted to how education finance can help schools recover and adapt in the face of disruption. We study how pandemic-era funding was used, what lessons districts learned, and how the expiration of those funds creates new fiscal challenges. We also examine how shifting federal priorities—such as efforts to scale back or restructure education funding—affect schools’ capacity to innovate, sustain supports, and equitably serve all students. Across this evolution, our commitment remains the same: to understand how funding systems can be designed to meet student needs while enabling schools to respond to change.
In our 20th anniversary publication, Russlynn Ali wrote about CRPE’s research on real-dollar spending within school districts. Russlynn was the perfect person to assess the impact of our work in this area, because she had drawn on it twice to great effect: once in California to advocate successfully for a more transparent state funding system, and later as head of USDOE’s Office of Civil Rights, to attack within-district spending inequities.
New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio has announced his big inequality-reducing school improvement initiative, a commitment to community schools. Citing Cincinnati’s community schools as their inspiration, DeBlasio and Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña pledge to start 40 new “wrap-around services” schools and add nearly 300 organizations to the list of approved after-school service providers.
State leaders and policymakers are working hard to figure out how to bolster the capacity of state education agencies to meet the unprecedented demands they face to drive improvements in K-12 performance and productivity.
This blog was originally published by the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, June 5, 2014 Charter schools are leading the nation in seeking new ways to personalize learning with a blend of teacher-led and technology-based instruction.
A new study released last week provides first glimpses at how blended learning is affecting student performance. The report, published by the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation and SRI International, is rich with information about blended-learning programs and implementation details, but the study’s new contribution to the field is that it presents an impact analysis of K–12 blended-learning programs.
In May 2002, CRPE produced a little publication with a huge audience. “A New Look at Inequities in School Funding: A Presentation on the Resource Variations Within Districts,” by Marguerite Roza and Karen Hawley Miles, was the most accessed publication on crpe.org for more than a year.
This fiscal analysis finds that early difficulties forecasting enrollment and revenue can undermine implementation of personalized-learning models that blend computer-based and teacher-led instruction.
There is no escaping the idea that state education agencies (SEAs) need to step up their acts. Most are gigantic bureaucracies designed to administer state and federal programs and to hold school districts accountable for reporting and fiscal requirements.