Journal Article

The role of poverty measurements in achieving educational equity through school finance reform

Hayes, Kathy, Taylor, Lori, Razzolini, Laura, Grosskopf, Shawna

2023

Overview

In this paper, we estimate a series of stochastic frontier cost functions for elementary schools, using a short panel of Texas data that allows us to account for student characteristics, input prices, environmental factors and student outcomes. Texas currently uses information about the share of students participating into the Free and Reduced Price Lunch (FRL) program to determine compensatory funding to provide to schools. The FRL measure has been criticized as a relatively poor measure of need. We consider a new, recently developed, measure of poverty, the Spatially Interpolated Demographic and Economic (SIDE) measure, as a possible complement or alternative to the FRL measure. SIDE uses the income of the neighborhood in which the school resides as the basis to assess need and poverty. We find that using both poverty metrics highlights the additional costs associated with serving high poverty populations in high poverty locations, i.e., neighborhood locations matter.

• Publisher: Springer Nature B.V
• Subject: Households / Poverty / School finance / Socioeconomic factors / Students