State and Local Policy Choices and Fiscal Effort for Education: Exploratory Analysis of the Distributive Effects of State Education Reform.

Overview & Synopsis

Given state activism in education reform during the 1980s, a major concern in the development of education policy is whether reform states have increased their financial support for education in order to achieve desired objectives. This paper describes findings of a study that explored the distributive nature of state and local policy choices in education through comparative analyses of their long-term fiscal effort for three distinctive public services--welfare, highways, and police. The study built upon the unitary model of taxation and expenditure policies. The findings imply that policy shifts may have led to changes in educational expenditure patterns. Providing the general structures of state-level distributive effects, multilevel analyses suggest that the first wave of state reform affected not only fiscal effort for education but also distributive tendencies in education expenditures. While state reform appeared to increase the level of resources allocated to public education versus other social services, the distributive effects of state education reform tend to vary among states with different racial compositions. Redistributive tendencies in education expenditures tend to be accompanied by a low level of fiscal effort for education. In addition, developmental versus redistributive tendencies in education expenditures tend to be highly conflicting. One figure, 5 tables, and 13 endnotes are included. (Contains 36 references.) (LMI)