Marguerite Roza

In this project, the researchers will study school boards' deliberations on spending education funds and whether return-on-investment (ROI) training would change financial deliberations of school boards. The ROI training includes 8 hours of virtual modules that cover basic budgeting processes, managing vendor contracts against ROI, as well as cost and outcomes in budget tradeoffs, etc. The ROI training took place during fall or winter of the 2022-23 school year.

Georgetown University's Edunomics Lab will convert its existing training materials on district and school finance into self-contained modules and make them freely available on the internet to postsecondary faculty and professional associations who train district and school leaders.

The purpose of this grant is to develop a school spending data archive of data from 10 states.

Over the last two decades, many large school districts across the United States have shifted away from deploying resources to schools based on uniform staffing formulas to allocating funds to schools based on the particular mix of students in the building. This emerging new allocation strategy is known as weighted student funding (WSF) or student-based allocation. Districts using WSF deploy a fixed-dollar amount to schools for each student type with larger increments going to students identi...