As the hour of oral arguments in Abbott v. Burke approaches, I suspect there will be some debate as to whether specific elements of the state’s new school finance formula SFRA are, in fact, appropriate. Two components of SFRA that concerned me long before I participated at trial on behalf of plaintiffs were the adjustment created to accomodate wage variation across New Jersey school districts, and the flat funding – census based approach – used for special education. Quite simply, both are bad policy and are particularly damaging to the state’s highest need children who are clustered in certain school districts – primarily Abbott districts. I will not further editorialize on this point here. But I will post links below to two academic papers on these specific topics which I have presented in recent years.
The first paper was presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association in the Spring of 2008 and involves analysis of wage adjustments in several state school finance formulas, concluding that statistically, New Jersey’s new GCA is among the worst (a finding I did not expect at the outset of the study).
The second paper, for which an abstract was submitted in Summer 2008, was presented at the 2009 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, and explores the assumption that children with disabilities are evenly distributed. The paper further explores the equity consequences of distributing funding on this assumption if false.
Bruce Baker is an Professor in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. From 1997 to 2008 he was a professor at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, KS. He is lead author with Preston Green (Penn State University) and Craig Richards (Teachers College, Columbia University) of Financing Education Systems, a graduate level textbook on school finance policy published by Merrill/Prentice-Hall. Professor Baker has written a multitude of peer reviewed research articles on state school finance policy, teacher labor markets, school leadership labor markets and higher education finance and policy. His recent work has focused on measuring cost variations associated with schooling contexts and student population characteristics, including ways to better design state school finance policies and local district allocation formulas (including Weighted Student Funding) for better meeting the needs of students.
Baker, along with Preston Green of Penn State University are co-authors of the chapter on Conceptions of Equity in the recently released Handbook of Research Education Finance and Policy, and co-authors of the chapter on the Politics of Education Finance in the Handbook of Education Politics and Policy and co-authors of the chapter on School Finance in the Handbook of Education Policy of the American Educational Research Association.
Professor Baker has also consulted for state legislatures, boards of education and other organizations on education policy and school finance issues and has testified in state school finance litigation in Kansas, Missouri and Arizona. He is a member of the Think Tank Review Panel, a group of academic researchers who conduct technical reviews of publicly released think tank reports on education policy issues.
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The paper on special education funding will appear in the near future in the Journal of Education Finance.
School Finance 101 
The paper on special education funding will appear in the near future in the Journal of Education Finance.