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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.

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Separation of Degrees: State-By-State Analysis of Teacher Compensation for Master’s Degrees
  • Research Reports    

Separation of Degrees: State-By-State Analysis of Teacher Compensation for Master’s Degrees

Marguerite Roza

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.

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Facing huge budget gaps, are school district officials forced to lay off teachers?
  • 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.

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Facing the Future: Financing Productive Schools
  • 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.

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Financing Schools for Results
  • 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.

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