2,868 research outputs found
New Jersey Charter School Funding
No full textAre New Jersey charter schools underfunded relative to district schools?
Advocates’ claims that charter schools are receiving almost 50% less than they should convinced the Christie Administration and the New Jersey Legislature to shift an additional $107.6 million from school districts to charter schools for the combined 2014-15 and 2015-16 academic years.
However, claims of dramatic underfunding of charter schools are based on faulty comparisons and are not accurate. The reality of charter school funding is much more complicated than advocates suggest.
There are differences in the per-pupil funding levels of individual charter schools, just as there are differences in funding levels among school districts. However, all New Jersey charter schools are receiving at least what they should under the state’s charter school law. And, some charter schools are actually funded at higher levels than their sending school districts, particularly when considering they're much less expensive to educate student populations.
The confusion surrounding charter school funding is understandable given the complexity of the charter school funding formula and the fact that the New Jersey Department of Education (NJDOE) does not make charter school funding information accessible to the public, as it does school district data.
This report is intended to help dispel the confusion around charter school funding by providing a detailed explanation of the mechanics of that funding
New Jersey’s primary ballot design enables party insiders to pick winners
No full textThe infamous Florida butterfly ballot of 2000, which may have cost Al Gore the Presidency, highlights the dramatic consequences of bad ballot design for general election outcomes. The design of primary election ballots can also have substantial consequences by determining which candidates advance to the general election.This research brief demonstrates how a unique ballot design has been helping shape electoral outcomes in New Jersey for more than two decades, shifting the power to decide who wins primary elections away from the voters and towards a small group of party insiders who control the candidate endorsement process
Countering the Rhetoric of Emerging Domestic Markets: Why More Information Alone Will Not Address the Capital Needs of Underserved Communities
No full textThis article critiques the idea that the private sector can take the lead in addressing the capital needs of underserved communities, focusing specifically on the emerging domestic markets approach advocated by Milken Institute researchers. This approach has three limitations. First, it treats all underserved communities as interchangeable, ignoring that they differ in important ways in the nature and causes of their capital constraints. Second, it claims that underserved communities lack access to capital primarily as a result of information failure, overlooking numerous other obstacles that discourage investment in such communities. Third, its overarching assumption that the private sector can take the lead in meeting the capital needs of underserved communities is unrealistic because it fails to address these additional barriers to investment. The article recommends a more individualized approach to understanding the capital needs of underserved communities and recognition of the need for public sector leadership in solving this problem.Peer reviewe
New Jersey Charter School Funding
No full textAre New Jersey charter schools underfunded relative to district schools?
Advocates’ claims that charter schools are receiving almost 50% less than they should convinced the Christie Administration and the New Jersey Legislature to shift an additional $107.6 million from school districts to charter schools for the combined 2014-15 and 2015-16 academic years.
However, claims of dramatic underfunding of charter schools are based on faulty comparisons and are not accurate. The reality of charter school funding is much more complicated than advocates suggest.
There are differences in the per-pupil funding levels of individual charter schools, just as there are differences in funding levels among school districts. However, all New Jersey charter schools are receiving at least what they should under the state’s charter school law. And, some charter schools are actually funded at higher levels than their sending school districts, particularly when considering their much less expensive to educate student populations.
The confusion surrounding charter school funding is understandable given the complexity of the charter school funding formula and the fact that the New Jersey Department of Education (NJDOE) does not make charter school funding information easily accessible to the public. For example, there is no charter equivalent of the User Friendly Budget Summaries, which the NJDOE makes available for each school district. The NJDOE also does not make public the charter aid summaries, which show the amount of funding that each charter school receives from each sending school district and how that amount is calculated. In contrast, the NJDOE publishes detailed aid summaries for all school districts.
This report helps dispel the confusion around charter school funding by providing a detailed explanation of the mechanics of that funding. The report does so in part by examining several specific school districts. The first district—Jersey City—was selected because it is home to a large number of charter schools. Jersey City also is frequently singled out as having particularly inequitable charter school funding. Several Jersey City charter schools have even filed a lawsuit challenging the amount of funding that they receive from the district.
The second district—Red Bank—was selected because it is home to a charter school that draws students only from that school district and serves the same grade span as the district, facilitating a more direct comparison of district and charter school funding. The Red Bank case study helps highlight some of the methodological challenges of such comparisons.
This report also examines trends related to charter and district student demographic composition in the nine districts with the largest charter school enrollments. Appendixes A, B, and C to the report provide additional specifics about New Jersey’s charter school funding, including facility funding. The report concludes with policy and research recommendations
New Jersey Charter Schools: A Data-Driven View - 2018 Update, Part I
No full textNew Jersey charter schools have grown significantly over the last decade in enrollment, in the number of sending school districts, and in financial impact:
•In the 2017-18 school year, enrollment in New Jersey’s traditional and renaissance charter schools surpassed 53,000 students, accounting for 3.6% of the state’s publicly funded student population.
•Charter enrollment has more than tripled over the last decade.
•Almost half of all New Jersey school districts send students and funding to charter schools. The number of such districts has increased from 198 in 2007-08 to 273 in 2017-18.
•In the 2017-18 school year, traditional and renaissance charter schools will receive an anticipated 164 million transferred to charter schools a decade ago.
New Jersey charter schools enroll a fundamentally different student population than the districts where their students reside:
•New Jersey charter schools continue to enroll proportionally fewer special education and Limited English Proficient students than their sending district public schools.
•The special education students enrolled in charter schools tend to have less-costly disabilities compared to special education students in the district public schools.
•Measures of student poverty are becoming increasingly unreliable because of school district participation in the US Department of Agriculture’s Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), which allows high-poverty school districts and charter schools to provide free meals to all of their students. However, data for non-CEP districts shows that many charter schools continue to enroll fewer at-risk students then their sending district public schools.
In light of these findings, we recommend that:
•New Jersey should amend the state’s charter school law, The Charter School Program Act, to align the power to authorize new charter schools and expand existing charter schools with the financial impact of those decisions.
•The New Jersey Department of Education (NJDOE) should modify the criteria used for evaluating charter schools for approval, renewal, expansion, and closure, to give substantial weight to how closely individual charter schools mirror the student population characteristics of their sending school districts, including Limited English Proficiency, economic disadvantage, and special education disability classifications.
•NJDOE should examine why New Jersey charter schools do not reflect the population of their sending school districts and make public the data that is already collected, to enable researchers to further study this problem.
•NJDOE should explore more accurate ways of measuring differences in student socio-economic status, including survey and sampling methods.Research report
Sass Gábor munkássága. Egy gazdasági géptan tankönyv születéstörténete
No full textThis article examines the work of Gábor Sass, a mechanical engineer, as a textbook author and his textbook on Economic Mechanics. We draw heavily on the author\u27s papers, a valuable part of the Collection of Agricultural History Papers of the Hungarian Agricultural Museum and Library. The collection of documents includes the review reports on the textbook, the author\u27s reply, the author\u27s correspondence with the agricultural machinery companies, and his correspondence with his co-author, Béla Molnár, in 1935 and 1936. Information on the actual use of the textbook in schools was gathered from contemporary school notices. For the biography of Sass, we consulted Gyula Réz\u27s 1989 book, and for our knowledge of the history of machinery, we consulted János Estók\u27s 2001 volume. Our research is interdisciplinary since it enriches our understanding of agricultural history, the history of agricultural education, and the history of machinery and mechanical engineering, in addition to school history and textbook history.Írásunk a gépészmérnök Sass Gábor tankönyvírói munkásságát és Gazdasági géptan tankönyvét veszi górcső alá. Kiemelten támaszkodunk a szerző irathagyatékára, mely a Magyar Mezőgazdasági Múzeum és Könyvtár Agrártörténeti Iratok Gyűjteményének értékes darabja. Az iratcsomó a tankönyvről készült bírálati jelentéseket, a szerzői választ, a szerzőnek a mezőgazdasági gépgyárakkal folytatott levelezéseit, valamint a szerzőtárssal, Molnár Bélával folytatott 1935-ös és 1936-os levélváltásait is őrzi. A tankönyv tényleges iskolai használatára vonatkozó adatokat a korabeli iskolai értesítőkből gyűjtöttük ki. Sass életrajzához irathagyatéka mellett Réz Gyula 1989-es írását, géptörténeti ismereteink kiegészítéséhez Estók János 2001-es kötetét hívtuk segítségül. Kutatásunk interdiszciplináris kötöttségű, hiszen az iskolatörténeti és tankönyvtörténeti kutatások mellett az agrártörténeti, agrár szakoktatástörténeti, továbbá géptörténeti- és gépgyártástörténeti ismereteinket egyaránt gazdagítj
Shifting ground: Can community development loan funds continue to serve the neediest borrowers?
No full textCommunity development financial institutions (CDFIs) are designed to improve economic conditions for low-income individuals and communities by providing a range of financial products and services that often are not available from mainstream lenders and financiers. ; Part I of this paper reviews CDLF origins, structures, and current activities. Part II discusses the field’s historic sources of subsidized capital and why they have shrunk. Part III reviews potential new sources of capital and the organizational ways that CDLFs are responding to their changed environment. The paper concludes with recommendations for CDLFs, funders, and policy makers.Community development ; Loans
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