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.
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.
In this brief, CRPE analysts find that most of Washington’s largest districts spend less per math or science teacher than for teachers in other subjects.
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.
This brief demonstrates how, contrary to common worry, closing Title I’s “comparability provision” loophole would not force districts to mandatorily reassign teachers.
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.
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.