Valuing Tension: Understanding Public School Funding

Since education finance and resource allocation touch almost every aspect of educational systems, it is challenging to define the boundaries of school funding and education finance scholarship. The author of this chapter seeks to present relevant information on how schools are funded, by first introducing a conceptual model, the values-in-tension model, to categorize and organize education finance scholarship. He then presents a review of relevant research into the governance levels of school finance and the dimensions of education funding mechanisms that are common across all U.S. states, territories, and tribal nations. Finally, he identifies new and emergent areas of scholarship in school finance. 

Keywords: policy; finance; equity