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This paper presents a case study of two California school districts, San Francisco and Oakland, each of which have implemented their own versions of what is popularly known as a weighted student formula (WSF). One primary goal of the WSF policy is to increase the equity with which resources are distributed to schools. With respect to equity, the findings suggest that for particular schooling levels per-pupil spending became more responsive to student poverty and that the increase in responsiveness appears to have coincided with implementation of the WSF in the two districts. Moreover, each district relies on a different mechanism for driving resources to the schools: San Francisco relying to a greater degree on the unrestricted funds, while Oakland relies more heavily on restricted sources which, as directed by law, drive dollars to special need populations. Interestingly, neither district exhibited any significant change in the distribution of teacher experience after implementation of their SBF models; schools serving the highest proportion of students from low-income families continued to employ teachers with the least experience after implementation of the SBF models. While an additional goal of WSF was to drive more resources down to the school level to be spent, our analysis found little substantial change in the proportion of resources expended at the school versus the district level. (Contains 5 figures and 2 tables.)

In 1993, the Campaign for Fiscal Equity (CFE) challenged New York State's school financing system on the grounds that it failed to provide students sufficient opportunity for a sound basic education in New York City. CFE prevailed in 2003, after the case went before the New York Court of Appeals, and the state's funding system was determined to be unconstitutional and ordered to be altered to ensure "adequate" funding. The final decision decreed that before any remediation take place, an objective study be conducted to determine how much it would cost to provide an "adequate" education for all public school students in the state, on which this article is based. Although a professional judgment approach forms the centerpiece of the work, components of the analysis draw on other methodological tools (i.e., public engagement, expert panels, and successful schools) to further support the results. We find that for a majority of districts significantly higher levels of spending are required if the state wishes to provide a sound basic education to all public school students. Furthermore, the results show a clear negative relationship between the district-level shortfall in spending and educational outcomes across virtually all student subpopulations.