School Finance

With the advent of the standards movement in the late 1990s, raised expectations for improved academic achievement for all students put pressure on school systems to use their resources more effectively. While a number of promising school improvement strategies were identified at that time, there was little research into their implementation costs, and cost is often perceived as a barrier to their adoption by schools. The CPRE Finance Project initiated a research agenda that shed some light on the costs of school improvement and the financial capacity of schools to implement improvement strategies.

The research carried out by the CPRE Finance Project (late 1990s through 2007) looked at both the current expenditure patterns of schools in a variety of district and state fiscal contexts as well as the costs of school improvement strategies at both the district and school site levels. Particular emphasis was placed upon the costs of professional development and comprehensive school reform designs as well as improvement strategies that have been found to be effective through concurrent research by the other CPRE member institutions.