Spurred by court rulings requiring states to increase public-school funding, the United States now spends more per student on K-12 education than almost any other country. Yet American students still achieve less than their foreign counterparts, their performance has been flat for decades, millions of them are failing, and poor and minority students remain far behind their more advantaged peers. In this book, Eric Hanushek and Alfred Lindseth trace the history of reform efforts and conclude that the principal focus of both courts and legislatures on ever-increasing funding has done little to improve student achievement. Instead, Hanushek and Lindseth propose a new approach: a performance-based system that directly links funding to success in raising student achievement. This system would empower and motivate educators to make better, more cost-effective decisions about how to run their schools, ultimately leading to improved student performance. Hanushek and Lindseth have been important participants in the school funding debate for three decades. Here, they draw on their experience, as well as the best available research and data, to show why improving schools will require overhauling the way financing, incentives, and accountability work in public education.
It is enlightening, maddening, hopeful, frustrating and amazingly informative... The book provides a terrific summary of how the U.S. education system has changed since World War II. It makes a telling argument about how much our well-being depends on our schools. It eviscerates the policymaking that has ruled public education for the last half century. And it buries for all time the notion that getting the courts to fix our schools has any chance of success. -- Jay Mathews Washington Post Hanushek and Lindseth conclusively enlighten policy makers, professors, school administrators, legal and educational researchers, and undergraduate and graduate students of school administration by providing an exhaustive discussion of decades of school funding and the results for student achievement... The authors' experience and expertise in school funding, research, and data analysis and their ideas for the future of funding and accountability make this an absolute must read. Choice This important new book by economist Eric Hanushek and attorney Alfred Lindseth is the most cogent and comprehensive analysis of America's school-finance challenges that I have ever seen. -- Chester Finn, Jr. Education Gadfly
| List of Illustrations | p. ix |
| List of Tables | p. xiii |
| Preface | p. xv |
| Introduction | p. 1 |
| Just How Important Is Education? | p. 10 |
| Education and Financial Achievement | p. 11 |
| Education and Poverty | p. 15 |
| Education and the Nation's Economic Well-Being | p. 16 |
| Testing Student Skills | p. 20 |
| Quality of U.S. Colleges | p. 21 |
| U.S. Education at a Crossroads | p. 23 |
| Years of School Completed | p. 23 |
| Achievement Levels (or the Mastery of Cognitive Skills) | p. 29 |
| International Comparisons | p. 36 |
| Achievement Gaps | p. 38 |
| The Political Responses | p. 44 |
| Increased Spending and Resources for K-12 Education | p. 45 |
| Increased Equity in Funding for K-12 Education | p. 57 |
| The Standards and Accountability Movement | p. 71 |
| Increased School Choice Options | p. 76 |
| Teacher Certification | p. 80 |
| Conclusions | p. 82 |
| Court Interventions in School Finance | p. 83 |
| Federal Desegregation Litigation and Milliken II Remedies | p. 84 |
| "Equity" Cases | p. 88 |
| "Adequacy" Cases | p. 95 |
| Practical Issues with Educational Adequacy | p. 118 |
| Defining an "Adequate" Education | p. 118 |
| The Element of Causation | p. 129 |
| Problems Relating to Remedy | p. 136 |
| Problems Inherent in the Makeup and Processes of the Courts | p. 139 |
| The Effectiveness of Judicial Remedies | p. 145 |
| Kentucky | p. 147 |
| Wyoming | p. 151 |
| New Jersey | p. 157 |
| Massachusetts | p. 166 |
| Science and School Finance Decision Making | p. 171 |
| A Simple Decision Model | p. 172 |
| How Much Is Enough? | p. 173 |
| How Should the Money Be Spent? | p. 200 |
| Using Science More Effectively | p. 211 |
| A Performance-Based Funding System | p. 217 |
| Guiding Principles: Back to Basics | p. 218 |
| A Performance-Based Funding System | p. 219 |
| Big City Schools | p. 258 |
| Conclusions | p. 260 |
| Making Performance-Based Funding a Reality | p. 263 |
| The Persistence of Illusory Spending Solutions | p. 263 |
| Support for the Status Quo and Resistance to Change | p. 268 |
| Some Current Countervailing Forces | p. 275 |
| Encouraging True Reform: Mutually Agreed Bargains | p. 279 |
| Changing the Focus of the Courts | p. 281 |
| Mobilizing for the Future | p. 287 |
| Notes | p. 291 |
| Legel Citations | p. 353 |
| Federal Court Cases (arranged in alphabetical order) | p. 353 |
| State Court Cases (arranged by state and, within states, chronologically) | p. 354 |
| Sources for Figures and Tables | p. 361 |
| References | p. 363 |
| Index | p. 395 |
| Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved. |
ISBN: 9780691130002
ISBN-10: 0691130000
Audience:
Professional
Format:
Hardcover
Language:
English
Number Of Pages: 432
Published: 27th April 2009
Dimensions (cm): 24.1 x 16.6
x 3.137
Weight (kg): 0.732