Resource Equity in the Chicago Public Schools: A School- Level Approach.

Abstract

recent years, a number of large urban school districts have begun efforts to decentralize important decision making authority from the central district office to the local school level, giving greater control over budgeting and management to school staff and parents. Mirroring this approach, school finance researchers are increasingly examining resource allocation issues at more microlevels, such as schools and classrooms. In analyzing funding equity, however, much of the focus has remained at the district-level. While district-level analyses are particularly appropriate for examining systematic relationships between funding levels and district tax bases, they can obscure important resource disparities that may arise between schools within a single district. These issues may be especially critical in large urban districts serving diverse student populations and many students with special needs. This study seeks to help fill this gap by examining resource allocations at the school level in the Chicago Public Schools. Specifically, this article investigates the equity of school-level resource allocations in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) for the 1994-95 school year, the sixth year following the passage of the Chicago School Reform Act. In order to better understand the intradistrict distribution of funding to schools, the article summarizes the results of quantitative analyses of CPS school-level budgets. Because of the inherent difficulties in measuring value-laden concepts such as equity, this article uses a variety of methods and mea