| Introduction and Overview to School Finance | |
| Equity and Adequacy Frameworks in School Finance | |
| The Public Finance Context | |
| School Finance Structures: Formula Options and Needs Adjustments | |
| Improving State School Finance Systems | |
| Allocation and Use of Funds at the District, School, and Classroom Levels | |
| Ways to Improve Educational Productivity | |
| Using Education Dollars More Wisely to Improve Results | |
| Creating an Education System with Incentives | |
| School-Based Financing: Formula Funding of School Sites | |
| Changing Teacher Salary Structures | |
| Appendix | |
| Glossary | |
| References | |
| Author Index | |
| Subject Index | |
| Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved. |
Allan Odden is the director of the consortium for Policy Research at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He also serves on the Carnegie Corporation Task Force on Learning in the Primary Grades and the National Research Center's Committee on Educational finance Equity, Adequacy and Productivity. Odden taught at the University of California's School of education and was president of the American Educational Finance Association from 1979-1980. Odden has written Financing Schools for High Performance: Strategies for Improving the Use of Educational Resources and co-wrote Paying Teachers for What They Know
Lawrence O. Picus is a Professor in the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California. He serves as the director of the Center for Research in Education Finance (CREF), a research center in the School of Education at the University of Southern California. CREF research focuses on issues of school finance and productivity. He has also conducted research on the costs of alternative assessment programs for the Center for Research on Evaluation, Student Standards and Testing (CRESST) at UCLA. Picus is past-president of the American Education Finance Association. He is a co-author of Principles of School Business Administration (ASBO, 1995) with R. Craig Wood, David Thompson, and Don I. Tharpe. In addition, he is the senior editor of the 1995 yearbook of the American Education Finance Association, Where Does the Money Go? Resource Allocation in Elementary and Secondary Schools (Corwin, 1995). He has published numerous articles in professional journals as well. Picus’ teaching responsibilities include courses in school finance, educational policy, school business administration, school district budgeting, economics of education, the politics of education in the United States, and the application of computers to school district management. In his role with CREF, he is involved with studies of how educational resources are allocated and used in schools across the United States. He has also conducted studies on the impact of incentives on school district performance. Picus maintains close contact with the superintendents and chief business officers of school districts throughout California and the nation, and is a member of a number of professional organizations dedicated to improving school district management. He also serves as a consultant to the National Education Association, American Federation of Teachers, the National Center for Educational Statistics, WestEd and the states of Vermont, Washington, and Arkansas. Prior to coming to USC, Picus spent four years at the RAND Corporation, where he earned a Ph.D. in Public Policy Analysis. He holds a Masters Degree in Social Science from the University of Chicago, and a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from Reed College. He has a strong background in research design, statistics, and econometrics.
