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

Lori Taylor, Shawna Grosskopf, Kathy Hayes () and Laura Razzolini ()
Additional contact information
Lori Taylor: Texas A&M University
Kathy Hayes: Southern Methodist University

Journal of Productivity Analysis, 2023, vol. 60, issue 2, No 2, 109-127

Abstract: Abstract 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.

Keywords: Educational cost function; School finance; Alternative poverty measures; Educational equity; Stochastic frontier cost function (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11123-022-00657-w Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:jproda:v:60:y:2023:i:2:d:10.1007_s11123-022-00657-w

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/11123/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11123-022-00657-w

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Productivity Analysis is currently edited by William Greene, Chris O'Donnell and Victor Podinovski

More articles in Journal of Productivity Analysis from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().