Blockchain Papers

Allan Odden

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Juan Prawda

No abstract is available for this record.

William H. Clune

Systemic educational policy recommends creating more ambitious instruction in schools through a centralized strategy of mandatory curriculum frameworks, high-stakes student assessments, and coordinated teacher training. This article suggests serious problems with such a strategy and recommends a decentralized alternative involving local choice of curricula, technical assistance, and professional development. Arguments for, problems with, and alternatives to the centralized strategy are examined in eight dimensions of educational policy: curriculum development, curriculum stratification, educational indicators, high-stakes examinations for students, school improvement, educational finance, educational governance, and teacher training. The article concludes with recommendations for policy and research.

Austin D. Swanson, Richard A. King

Changes in public policy with respect to governance structures require complementary changes in public policy concerning the financing of educational services. Drawing on their findings from studies in Australia, England and the USA, the authors present a framework to clarify what is happening in the restructuring of school governance and to project the implications for public policy concerning the finance of schooling. The political system is represented by a decision matrix which arrays the decisions that have to be made about financing schools (who gets what, when and how) with the primary decision makers (society, the educating profession and families). The decision‐making process is shown to be a dynamic one, causing the nature of acceptable decisions to change along with political‐economic environments and with priorities given to policy objectives. Using the model, the implications of alternative centralization/decentralization strategies for school finance policy are examined under varying circumstances.

Marlaine E. Lockheed

Decentralization policies are at the heart of education reform efforts in many countries internationally. Two important types of policies are those that: (a) remove barriers to private education; and (b) devolve authority and responsibility for schools from central level administrations to intermediate level organizations and ultimately to schools, relying more on local communities for financing, with an overall goal of improving effectiveness. While both types of policies are largely uninformed by empirical evidence regarding their impact on such education outcomes as student learning, in developing countries the evidence regarding the effects of local control is much weaker than that regarding private schools. This paper extends the literature on the impact of private education on achievement, while providing the first evidence on the impact of local control on achievement in a developing county. It analyzes data from 214 secondary schools in the Philippines to answer questions regarding: (a) the relative effectiveness of local, government and private secondary schools; and (b) the factors that account for observed differences.

Priscilla Wohlstetter, Thomas Buffett

Exemplary approanes to school-based budgeting are examined in this paper. Interviews were conducted with district staff involved in implementing school-based budget reforms in five school districts--Chicago, Dade County (Florida), Detroit, Los Angeles, and Edmonton (Canada)--and with state-level staff in California, Florida, Kentucky, and England. The first section offers a review of literature, with a focus on key school finance issues. The second and third sections analyze the design and organization of different approaches to school-based budgeting and highlight the various ways in which local districts and states encourage school-based budgeting. The fourth section proposes a set of initiatives for state and local policymakers to enhance implementation while maintaining fiscal accountability. The recommendation is made for creation of a partnership between staLes and districts for implementing school-based management, with responsibility varying according to states' different political cultures. Specifically, the partPership would be responsible for specifying the ends of the educational system and school sites would have authority over the means. Four tar)les are Included. (16 references) (LMI) ***************************/!******************************************* Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made * from the original document. *********************************************************************** SCHOOL-BASED MANAGEMENT IN BIG CITY DISTRICTS: ARE DOLLARS DECENTRALIZED TOO? By Priscilla Wohlstetter and Thomas Buffett Center for Research in Education Finance (CREF) School of Education University of Southern California

Rodney J. Reed

School results for children of poverty ‐ those forced by that poverty to live in inner‐city neighbourhoods ‐generally indicate educational failure at a much higher rate than is seen for students nurtured by wealthier school districts. This failure in school severely limits chances of social and economic upward mobility, which translates into a waste of human capital for the nation's business‐industrial‐political complex, and dashed hopes, dreams and self‐esteem for the individual. Parents and concerned citizens from across socio‐economic strata, long aware of the general inadequacy of schools in poor communities, have demanded improvement, often seeking it through legal and political means. Important strategies among the various federal, state and local school reform efforts to make schooling a meaningful process for all students, and particularly the minority poor, are decentralization and citizen/parent empowerment, the focus of this chapter. The movement to decentralize school governance ‐ an effort to place control into the hands of the people being served ‐ has gained momentum and exists in some form in most large‐city school districts today. An extension of administrative decentralization, citizen/parent empowerment is seen as one of several factors, including teacher and administrator preparation, curriculum renewal, school financing, and school restructuring, vital in the improvement of schools. A look at the meaning and scope of decentralization, operationalized through citizen/parent empowerment, and its probable effectiveness in improving school outcomes indicates that, alone, it is insufficient to ensure positive academic and social performance in school.

Deborah A. Verstegen

The Reagan administration’s “New Federalism” agenda focused on redirecting national priorities and decentralizing domestic programs through budgetary policy. This research analyzes the consequences of national policy shifts occurring over the decade of the 1980s for public education. Utilizing a multimethod research design, it addresses four fundamental questions: (a) What have been the federal investments in education during the Reagan years? (b) How has the overall Department of Education (ED) budget fared over this time? (c) How have individual programs in ED been affected? (d) In sum, what fiscal changes have occurred in education during the Reagan presidency and to what extent have devolution and diminution in federal education policy been influenced by the Administration’s policies? The author finds significant shifts have occurred in federal education policy and finance during the 1980s. Tax reductions, deficit financing, dwindling productivity, and an uncertain economic outlook indirectly accomplished what could not be otherwise achieved, and set the basis for a new era in national education policy and finance well beyond the Reagan years.

George E. Briggs, Stephen B. Lawton

This paper explores some definitions of school -eased budgeting and other forms of decentralization, attempts to determine the extent of their adoption, develops some indications of aecentralization results, and provides suggestions for further research directions. The paper addresses (1) how often decentralization involving a change in resource allocation procedures is mentioned as a possible response to demand for change in educational systems; (2) the nature of the demand for changes in school system organization; (3) whether decentralization reported in the literature shifts resource allocation procedures toward the school level; and (4) whether decentralization produces improvements in efficiency, effectiveness, and accountability. The study reviews 14 articles published between 1980-83. Each article was analyzed to elicit answers to the research questions, and the results were tabulated according to sample size, attitude toward decentralization, nature of demand for organizational change, classification of the type of decentralization, and the results of the innovation adopted. Decentralization appears to be a positive innovation for addressing the demands for organizational change in school systems. Further research into the definition of decentralization and the development of a model of decentralization is required. More concrete, reportable research data are needed, in addition to more school-level studies of decentralization effects, including their impact on the budgeting process in school systems. (28 references) (MLH) * Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made * * from the original document. * EFFICIENCY, EFFECTIVENESS AND THE DECENTRALIZATION OF LOCAL SCHOOL SYSTEMS George Briggs, Ridley College St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada and Stephen Lawton, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education Toronto, Ontario, Canada Presented at the Annual Conference of the American Education Finance Association San Antonio, Texas March 9-11, 1989 U S DEPARTMENT OF ' ...ATIO' Deice or Fytucationsi eesesich and inn, a nom EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (010 his documar, has been rep duceo as isceiyed fro n the person or cocoa-Nation ortoinating tt 1 Minor changes have been made to improve reproduction aLality 4 P0,13 01 view or opinions stated in this docu Merit do not necessarily represent officiat OEFI position or policy PERMISSION TO REPROL,CE THIS MATERIAL HAS BEEN GRANTED eY TO THE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC) EFFICIENCY. EFFECTIVENESS AND THE DECENTRALIZATION OF LOCAL SCHOOL SYSTEMS

Emmanuel Jiménez, George Psacharopoulos, Jee-Peng Tan

With the current constrained financial conditions in many developing countries, it is essential to develop and utilize new methods of financing education to ensure efficiency and greater social equity. The current financing arrangements in many cases result in an underinvestment in education, an untapped willingness to pay for education and a misallocation of public spending in this sector. This report examines three broad policy options that could remedy the above problems. It is argued that they would result in an increase of resources flowing to education, improve their use, and ensure more equitable access to schooling. Although the suggested reforms need to be phased in gradually, and their specific content will differ among countries, the package includes three elements. They comprise: (1) recovering the public cost of higher education and reallocating government spending on education toward the level with the highest social returns; (2) developing a credit market for education, together with selective scholarships, especially in higher education; and (3) decentralizing the management of public education and encouraging the expansion of private and community-supported schools.

James W. Guthrie

Recent U.S. economic instability has had a significant but unanticipated policy consequence for education. Unusually high rates of inflation in the late 1970s and a subsequent recession did not lead to serious erosion nationally in resources allocated for education. The decentralized manner in which education is financed in the United States and enrollment declines buffered schools and colleges more than most other social service sectors. By 1985 both K–12 grade school systems and postsecondary institutions had generally recouped financial support. However, persistent economic uncertainty fueled by continuing conditions such as high federal deficits, nagging unemployment, foreign trade imbalances, and growing overseas borrowings has evoked intensified public faith in education as a means for regaining U.S. economic vitality. Current reform efforts intended to make education more rigorous and productive are one of the outcomes.

Jim Leslie Gelbman

This study sought to examine and analyze the implementation of public policies by District 12's Community School Boards (CSB) and superintendents under the Decentralization Law of 1969. The Law did not give communities total control over the schools. It did, however, grant decentralized districts significant powers including the hiring of superintendents, principals, teachers, and school aides. With respect to curricula, the Boards in District 12 were empowered to implement and evaluate their own programs under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA, 1965). There were, however, forces outside the schools that influenced the CSB's and the superintendents. District 12, especially the Charlotte Street area, had the highest concentration of poor people in New York City in 1970. Illiteracy, welfare, drug abuse, gang activity, fires and crime naturally had an impact on the schools. Federal and State policies, as well as Board of Education By-Laws, allowed community groups greater participation in the educational process. As a result, several community organizations financed through the Office of Economic Opportunity, demanded their share of community control over the resources allocated for the schools. The CSB, then, was not an independent entity, and, as District 12's policies clearly indicated, the improvement of the schools was incidental to the Boards' other priorities. Policy-implementation in District 12 changed through the 1970's as the Boards changed. The issue of patronage made it clear that politics, not education, dominated District 12's later School Boards. In examining the issues, the main focus was to determine the extent of community participation and control. In view of the Boards' interaction with different forces from without the schools, did the concept of decentralization allow the superintendents and the Boards in District 12 to formulate their policies for the improvement of schools? The data strongly indicated that decentralization provided District 12's residents the opportunity of participating in the educational establishment. There were no data, however, that showed any of the programs implemented by District 12's Boards significantly improved the schools. On the other hand, decentralization gave hundreds of residents jobs and gave parents the right to elect and confront their own CSB members.

Austin D. Swanson

well established in the United States. With few exceptions, states are paying a larger share of total education costs and, increasingly, states are setting limits on how much or how little school districts may spend for educational services. While generally acknowledged as inevitable, the movement has raised fears that the viability of local control is threatened and that the advantages of decentralized policy making are soon to be lost. The fear is summed up in the adage, He who pays the piper calls the tune. That is a possibility, but it need not be. There is much to be learned in this respect from the experience of England. The English have developed a system of schooling whereby approximately twothirds of the costs are borne by the central government while local educational authorities exercise a greater degree of discretion than enjoyed by their counterparts in the United States especially at the school building level. The purpose of this paper is to describe the relationship between central and local government in England and to draw implications for practice in the United States with specific reference to education.

Robert P. Inman

In 1971 the California Supreme Court opened the door to a major reform movement to restructure the present system of decentralized school finance. With the exception of Hawaii, elementary and secondary education in the United States is supported primarily by local property taxation supplemented in part by state funded grants-in-aid. The California Supreme Court, in the now famous Serrano rulings, declared the California system in violation of the state constitution's equal protection clause. Similar rulings have also been handed down by the New Jersey Supreme Court (Robinson vs. Cahill) and the Superior Court of Hartford, Connecticut (Horton vs. Meskill). In addition, ten states have recently enacted major reform bills, and legislation is under consideration in several others. The pressure for reform is strong and continuing. As a review of the recent reform proposals indicates, the legislative search for new means of financing local schools is not simply an incremental tinkering with existing laws.' Major changes, often court required, are at issue. Long-run outcomes are uncertain; each proposal has new winners and new losers. When planning a major reform of local school finance, therefore, past experience from incremental policymaking may not be an adequate guide to choice. Long-run general equilibrium predictive models and a clearly specified evaluation rule will be needed. It is the purpose of this paper to develop such a policy framework and to apply the analysis to one region currently in the midst of school reform, the New York metropolitan area. Six alternative reform proposals are considered: foundation aid, two district power equalization plans, property tax credits, expanded Title I assistance under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and centralized financing and spending controls. Preferred reforms are selected under utilitarian (promiddle class), Rawlsian (pro-poor), and equal school spending (Serrano) criteria.

Stephen D. Sugarman

Parents and teachers seem increasingly alienated from their own schools. Here are two proposals for giving individual parents and teachers power to determine how small but significant portions of the school budget will be spent. I am convinced that we need much more experi mentation with true decentralized control over the spending of educational funds; not the creation of minidistricts or the adoption of school-site budget ing, but rather decision making at the individual teacher and individual family levels. I recognize the power of the entrenched bureaucracies: school boards and administrators on the one hand, teacher organizations on the other. For some time to come they will exercise hegemony over most public education dollars. But perhaps there is an oppor tunity for innovation at the margin. This opportuni ty is limited because there are few new public dollars available for education beyond those in evitably committed to cost-of-living increases in employee salaries. Yet this makes all the more important the desirability of trying out bold alterna tives with those funds. The past few years of experience with more centralized decision making with respect to new (or extra) money ? federal Title I funds and similar pots or large increases in general state aid brought about through school finance reform ? have shown us that this route typically results in either 1) in creases in employee salaries or 2) the hiring of more personnel ? either aides or specialists (usually read ing specialists), plus bureaucrats. In a few places these expenditures are thought to be educationally quite successful. If nothing else, they may be viewed as medium-scale public employment and guaran teed-wage programs or, to the extent that school volunteers are being converted into paid workers, an inventive income transfer scheme. Yet it is not clear

Charles T. Clotfelter

SINCE 1954 nearly all vestiges of legal segregation of public schools in the South have been eliminated. But, at the same time, the suburbanization of households in Southern cities has contributed to the de facto resegregation of some schools. Just as the Tiebout hypothesis (1956) suggests that households locate according to their preferences regarding local public goods, there is some evidence to indicate that preferences for segregated schools may have contributed to this resegregation. Glantz and Delaney (1973) found that, by one measure, metropolitan residential segregation increased more during the 1960's in Southern metropolitan areas -where city schools were substantially desegregated than in the Northern metropolitan areas studied. And for some organizations, a primary reason for supporting recently ordered metropolitan desegregation plans which would effectively combine city and suburban school systems is the belief that desegregation of city schools alone merely contributed to white flight from the city.' But, because there are other factors which may also cause suburbanization of whites, such as employment decentralization and the growth of Negro ghettos, it is not clear whether school desegregation has had an independent effect on the demand for housing by households. This paper presents an analysis of housing prices to determine whether desegregation has an independent effect on the price paid by whites for housing. Since the supply of housing is relatively inelastic in the short run, an effect of this kind would support the hypothesis that desegregation affects households' demand for housing. While shifts in demand will result primarily in price effects in the short run, quantity changes and locational rearrangement will be most important in the long run. In order to determine if shifts in demand have accompanied desegregation, this paper will examine such price effects. The metropolitan area studied is Atlanta, Georgia, a Southern city which experienced school desegregation and apparent white flight during the 1960's. In 1960, a year before desegregation was begun, 37.2 % of the students in the city school system were Negro. By 1970 this figure was 67.1%. During the decade the proportion of Negro families in the city rose from 34.0% to 47.7%o. These changes reflect a number of different locational trends, one of the most important of which was a rapid growth in the city's Negro population. In order to assess the independent effect of school desegregation on housing demand, it is above all necessary to separate the effect of school racial composition from that of neighborhood racial composition, as well as other supply and demand factors affecting housing prices. The analysis presented in this paper uses data on housing prices and characteristics drawn from 1960 and 1970 census tract reports for Atlanta. The comparatively rapid end to de jure segregation in that city during the decade of the 1960's provides a unique opportunity to separate the effects of neighborhood and school integration. The empirical analysis supports the hypothesis that school desegregation does have a significant effect on housing prices, independent of neighborhood racial change. Section I discusses the use of housing prices in determining the effect of public service characteristics on housing demand. Sections II and III describe the data and the empirical findings. Section IV summarizes the analysis. Received for publication December 3, 1973. Revision acaccepted for publication July 30, 1974. * I am grateful to Professors Martin Feldstein, John Kain, Richard Freeman, and Gregory Ingram, members of the public finance and urban economics seminars at Harvard, and referees for this Review for comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Financial support was provided by the Ford Foundation. 1 See, for example, the testimony of William L. Taylor, Director of the Center for National Policy Review in hearings before the Senate Select Committee on Equal Educational Opportunity, November 30, 1971, p. 10475 or Junie Brown, City School Case: No End in Sight, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, December 31, 1972, pp. IA, 6A.

Martin Feldstein

A series of recent judicial decisions has focused public attention on the issue of local choice in the provision of public education. In Serrano vs. Priest, Rodriguez vs. San Antonio (1971), and similar cases in other states, the lower courts confirmed that education is a responsibility of the state government and held that local expenditures on education may not be a function of the taxable wealth of the local community.1 Although the United States Supreme Court has overturned these decisions in the appeal of Rodriguez vs. San Antonio (1973), the pressure to change the current system remains strong. The Supreme Court majority indicated that its decision reflected the limits of the federal constitutional authority and was not an approval of the status quo in educational finance. Litigation is now likely to shift to challenging the current methods as unconstitutional under state constitutions which, unlike the federal constitution, do deal specifically with education.2 Moreover, fundamental changes in the financing of local education may not require further pressure from the courts; state legislatures may seek to neutralize the effects of local wealth differences even if the current systems are not held to be unconstitutional. These judicial decisions and the ensuing legislative proposals run counter to the general economic view of local government finance. The basic presumption of economic analysis is that, because local governments can select different levels of service and because individuals can choose their area of residence, decentralized finance by local governments allows the provision of public services to reflect the variety of individual preferences for public services.3 Although the level of local spending may be nonoptimal because of intercommunity externalities and because of the method of local budget determination, fiscal decentralization still remains the only alternative to the insuperable problem of determining the optimal level of expenditure on a public service provided by a central government. In effect, autonomous decentralized financing of education provides a quasi market in which households can exercise their diverse preferences by their location decisions. This paper considers the problem of * Professor of economics, Harvard University. I am grateful to Charles Clotfelter for assistance with the statistical analysis, to Stephen Weiss for providing unpublished data on school expenditures, and to the Ford Foundation and National Science Foundation for financial support. I have benefited from discussions of an earlier version in seminars at Harvard, M.I.T., and Berkeley, and from comments by Noel Edelson, Eric Toder, and David Stern. An earlier and more complete discussion of this study was distributed as Harvard Institute of Economic Research paper no. 293, May 1973 (revised July 1973). 1 In Serrano vs. Priest, the landmark case in this area, the plaintiff and the courts were very much influenced by the line of argument and suggested remedies develope(l in John Coons et al. For a further discussion of the legal precedents, see Arthur Wise. 2 Almost immediately after the United States Supreme Court decision in Rodriguez vs. San Antonio, the New Jersey Supreme Court held that the current system of local finance violated the New Jersey state constitution. See Wise for a summary of the provisions of other state constitutions. I Charles Tiebout presented a formal analysis of the full efficiency of local government provision of public services under quite special conditions. See Wallace Oates and James Buchanan and Charles Goetz for a further discussion of these issues.

James E. Bruno

Public school finance in the United States is highly decentralized and can be described as the sum of separately determined school finance programs established by each state. Since funds to support educational expenditures in a school district come from various sources, primarily state and local, it is necessary for states to derive schemes by which these resources can be combined to finance education at the local level. The administration and derivation of these resource allocation schemes is usually carried out at the state level.

E. Brock Rideout, Sandra Najat

No abstract is available for this record.

Robert C. Weaver

anew the old problem of administrative control-centralized, or Federal, versus decentralized, or local. In such cooperative programs as public housing, social security, and education, which are financed jointly by Federal and local governments, this problem calls for certain definite and workable adjustments in accordance with our republican form of government. These adjustments are of the utmost importance to Negro citizens because the majority of them still live in the South where they generally do not participate actively in state or local government and, consequently, are usually unable to make effective demand for their full share of the benefits of the program. In order to assure equitable participation in decentralized programs, Negroes have sought both legislative and administrative safeguards. The public resolution appropriating funds for the Work Projects Administration for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1940, forbids racial discrimination in employment. Efforts have been made to have similar clauses inserted in legislation appropriating Federal funds for education and health.1