“Why Do Some Schools Get More and Others Less? An Examination of School-Level Funding in New York City”, by Schwartz, Stiefel, and Rubenstein
Analyzed “whether schools serving students with different levels of need receive different levels of resources” (Schwartz et al., 2009, p. 3).
“[education is] produced by schools rather than districts, the level and quality of resources received by the school itself will be critical to determining student performance” (Schwartz et al., 2009, p. 2).
“allocations [should] vary based on student grade level and identified needs (for bilingual education, special education of varying intensity, poverty), delivering higher per-pupil funding to schools with higher shares of students with special needs” (Schwartz et al., 2009, p. 8).
“Is It Getting Fairer? Examining Five Years of School Allocations Under Fair Student Funding”, conducted by the New York City Independent Budget Office
Investigated the outcomes of FSF over school years 2007-2008 through 2011-2012.
The delay in the full implementation of the formula disproportionately affected certain student populations.
“For the first four years, most of the weights related to student achievement and need were not found to have a statistically significant effect on the allocations” (IBO, 2013, p. 1)
By 2011-2012, however, all but one of the academic weights played a significant role in the allocations (IBO, 2013, p. 2).
New York Appleseed’s advocacy briefing on “Reflecting Historical Decisions: Fair Student Funding in New York City”
Outlined the FSF and highlights the deficiencies of FSF with a decade’s implementation.
Recommendation: “Fully fund all schools. In the event of insufficient funding, all schools should receive the same percentage of fair student funding” (New York Appleseed, 2020, p. 12).
Presented with the evidence on the Fair Student Funding outcomes, in multiple research studies since the conception to the application between 2007 to recently, the FSF did not wholly achieve what it set out to do.
