"Educational Inequality and School Finance: Why Money Matters for America?s Students
In Educational Inequality and School Finance, Bruce D. Baker offers a comprehensive examination of how US public schools receive and spend money. Drawing on extensive longitudinal data and numerous studies of states and districts, he provides a vivid and dismaying portrait of the stagnation of state investment in public education and the continuing challenges of achieving equity and adequacy in school funding. Baker explores school finance, the school and classroom resources derived from school funding, and how and why those resources matter. He provides a critical examination of popular assumptions that undergird the policy discourse around school funding8212notably, that money doesn8217t matter and that we are spending more and getting less8212and shows how these misunderstandings contribute to our reluctance to increase investment in education at a time when the demands on our educational system are rising. Through an introduction to the concepts of adequacy, equity, productivity,
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