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Education Finance

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.

  • Research Reports    

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.

Marguerite Roza

This analysis shows that school districts faced with large budget gaps could avoid some or all teacher layoffs by rolling back salaries.

  • Research Reports    

Ranking the States: Federal Education Stimulus Money and the Prospects for Reform

Marguerite Roza

This brief presents rank order projections of changes in state K-12 education spending amidst state revenue gaps and the addition of ARRA funds.

  • Research Reports    

Can Transfer and Articulation Policies Propel Community College Students to a Bachelor’s Degree—and Is This the Only Goal?

Betheny Gross, Dan Goldhaber

This brief considers the role of transfer and articulation policies in higher education policy and administration.

  • Research Reports    

Community College Transfer and Articulation Policies: Looking Beneath the Surface

Betheny Gross, Dan Goldhaber

This paper explores the relative importance of specific policy components on post-secondary outcomes, and how such policies impact students with different aspirations or economic and ethnic backgrounds.

  • Research Reports    

Seniority-Based Layoffs Will Exacerbate Job Loss in Public Education

Marguerite Roza

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.

  • Research Reports    

Projections of State Budget Shortfalls on K-12 Public Education Spending and Job Loss

Marguerite Roza

This brief makes early projections of of what state budget cuts might mean for education spending and job losses.

  • Research Reports    

Facing the Future: Financing Productive Schools

Paul Hill, Marguerite Roza, James Harvey

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.

  • Research Reports    

Funding Student Learning: How to Align Education Resources with Student Learning Goals

Paul Hill

This report summarizes the work of of the National Working Group on Funding Student Learning, a group of eleven top school finance scholars.

  • Research Reports    

Financing Schools for Results

Paul Hill, Marguerite Roza

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.

  • Research Reports    

Returns to Skill and Teacher Wage Premiums: What Can We Learn By Comparing the Teacher and Private Sector Labor Markets?

Dan Goldhaber, Michael DeArmond, Albert Liu, Dan Player

This paper offers empirical evidence on the size of incentives that might be needed to make teaching a relatively more attractive occupation for people with technical skills or high academic aptitude.

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