Educational Finance

While much of the research on resource allocation in the past has been concerned with state and national decisions, this book focuses on resource allocation decisions at the micro-level in education. Decisions made at the district, school, and classroom levels determine the adequacy and equity of resources actually made available to educational programs and individual students. This book shows how and why these decisions are made and their impact on schools and students.

Educational Law provides a comprehensive survey of the legal problems and issues that confront school administrators and policymakers. If there is a greater likelihood of litigation or error in a particular area of professional practice, the discussion is more extensive. The book is organized in accordance with the author's belief that students need to read cases to understand the subtlety and richness of the law, but for legal neophytes, cases without discussion and interpretation are often difficult to comprehend. Thus the text both explains the important concepts and principles of education law and presents court decisions to illuminate them. By employing this structure, the book combines the strengths of the traditional casebook and those of the legal treatise. It also discusses the implications of the law for educational policy and practice. Key features include the following: *Presentation --To aid comprehension, technical legal terms are carefully explained when first introduced and discussions of complex topics move logically from overview to elaboration of important details to summary of key topics and principles. *Cases --By integrating carefully edited cases into the analysis of legal issues, the book exposes students with little or no background in law to the subtlety and richness of legal thinking. *New Material --The third edition incorporates extensive treatment of new cases and legislation of the last five years. Topics that have been added or significantly expanded include: the No Child Left Behind Act, students rights--especially in the areas of free speech and search and seizure, vouchers and government assistance to private and religious schools, employment discrimination, racial and sexual harassment of students and school employees, affirmative action and voluntary school integration, equity and adequacy in school finance, issues relating to use of the Internet, and the law relating to special student populations. The table of cases contains about 250 more entries than in the second edition.

Michael T. Peddle is associate professor of public administration at Northern Illinois University.

Higher education matters. No longer the exclusive province of a small intellectual elite, it is a key element in national economic performance. A modern economy needs a high-quality university system, and needs to make it accessible to everyone who can benefit. But mass higher education is expensive, and competes for public funds with pensions and health care, to say nothing of nursery education and schools. How to pay for higher education has thus become a central issue. This book tells the story of the UK debate, illustrating a head-on collision between the economic imperatives of student loans and regulated market forces and the political imperative of "free" higher education. It also tells the story of the partnership of an economist and a political professional. The first part of the book contains selected writing from the late 1980s about two key elements in the puzzle: the proper design of student loans (writing which was picked up and promptly implemented in other countries), and the roleof regulated market forces, an area which remains a political minefield in most countries. The book traces those twin elements through the 1990s and into the 2000s, culminating in important--and perhaps path-breaking--legislation in 2004. Both sets of policies are rooted in the economics of information, and thus have technical roots not ideological ones. The only ideological element (a major preoccupation of both authors) is to widen access to higher education. The book offers lessons both about policy design and about the politics of reform of particular relevance to countries which have not yet addressed the issue, including many OECD countries, the more advanced post-communist reformingcountries and, increasingly to middle-income developing countries. More generally, the policies are suitable for any country which has the administrative capacity to collect income tax.