Author Description

This document contains papers from the Annual State Data Conference and includes the following: (1) "Does Money Matter for Minority and Disadvantaged Students? Assessing the New Empirical Evidence" (David Grissmer, Ann Flanagan, and Stephanie Williamson), which demonstrates that additional money matters for minority and disadvantaged students, but may not matter for highly advantaged students; (2) "Rethinking the Allocation of Teaching Resources: Some Lessons from High Performing Schools" (Karen Hawley Miles and Linda Darling-Hammond), which shows how five schools support extraordinarily high student achievement by reallocating instructional resources to maximize individual attention for students and learning time for teachers; (3) "Financing Education in the District of Columbia from the Perspective of the Financial Authority" (Joyce Ladner), which describes the District of Columbia Financial Authority efforts to revamp the area's failing schools; (4) "Does Money Matter? An Empirical Study Introducing Resource Costs and Student Needs to Educational Production Function Analysis" (Corrine Taylor), which shows that geographic cost variations and special-needs student costs do not appreciably affect per student expenditures; (5) "School District Expenditures, School Resources and Student Achievement: Modeling the Production Function" (Harold Wenglinsky), which uses hierarchical linear modeling to show that expenditures on instruction and central-office administration affect teacher-student ratios, which, in turn, affect student achievement; (6) "The Development of School Finance Formulas To Guarantee the Provision of Adequate Education of Low-Income Students" (Andrew Reschovsky and Jennifer Imazeki), which explores the quandary of developing an equitable school finance formula; two "cutting-edge" papers, (7) "Using Cost and Need Adjustments To Improve the Measurement of School Finance Equity" (Lauri Peternick, Becky A. Smerdon, William Fowler, Jr., and David H. Mou); a