In this study, a cost function is used to estimate the costs for California districts to meet the achievement goals set out for them by the state. I calculate estimates of base costs (i.e., per pupil costs in a district with relatively low levels of student need) and marginal costs (i.e., the...

This article reports the results of school budget simulations with 568 randomly selected California public school teachers, principals, and superintendents. Simulation participants were presented with the budget for a hypothetical school and asked to use that budget to employ the resources that...

This article describes the potential for using K–12 education data to support school improvement efforts and the effective and efficient use of education resources. It examines the availability and transparency of education data in California as part of the Getting Down to Facts effort to...

Governance is widely believed to be an important determinant of the effectiveness of educational systems. Yet there are few systematic evaluations of the linkages between educational governance and student outcomes, or cogent frameworks for evaluating the effectiveness of governance arrangements...

Certain studies and the California legislature have recently concluded that seniority preference rules in teacher collective bargaining agreements facilitate a teacher ‘quality gap’ by permitting senior teachers to transfer to schools with higher-performing and more affluent children. This...

An underlying premise of many resource adequacy studies is that reaching a specified set of educational outcomes is directly dependent on the level of resources. This article analyzes resource allocation practices among successful schools, low-performing schools, and average public schools in...

This article explores the components of an “adequate” education for linguistic minority students in California and attempts to distinguish these from the components of an adequate education for low-income students who are native English speakers. About 1.6 million students were classified as...