Full metadata
Title
Arizona's Students FIRST legislation: are there winners and losers
Description
ABSTRACT In Roosevelt v. Bishop (1994), Arizona public school districts and parents challenged Arizona's school financing system arguing that it was not "general and uniform" as required by the Arizona Constitution. The purpose of this study was to analyze Arizona's Students Fair and Immediate Resources for Students Today (Students FIRST) legislation, the remedy that resulted from the Roosevelt decision, empirically, and longitudinally. Three types of statistical analyses were conducted on a sample of 165 public school districts. Fiscal neutrality was measured for each of the eleven years of the study, to assess the association between the per-pupil Students FIRST funding level and the per-pupil property wealth. Multiple regression analysis was also conducted to assess if both property wealth and district size were associated with the distribution of Students FIRST funding. Finally, I analyzed the eleven-year average of the total Students FIRST funding distributed to school districts and assessed how the plaintiff districts ranked in the distribution. Overall, the findings revealed that Students FIRST met the fiscal neutrality standard in some, but not in all the categories and years of this study, per-pupil property wealth was only weakly related to, and district size was not associated with, Students FIRST funding. The analysis of average funding suggested that some property rich school districts benefited most from Students FIRST. These results suggest that the traditional measures used to assess the fiscal neutrality of operating funding may not be appropriate for assessing the fiscal neutrality of capital finance reforms. While the results of this study provide some suggestive evidence that Students FIRST did not fulfill the Court's mandate, additional research is needed as to whether or not Arizona's capital finance system has resulted in disparities in funding that fall short of the constitutional standard.
Date Created
2011
Contributors
- Baca, Kenneth R (Author)
- Powers, Jeanne M. (Thesis advisor)
- Garcia, David R. (Committee member)
- Essigs, Chuck (Committee member)
- Arizona State University (Publisher)
Topical Subject
- Education finance
- Arizona Students FIRST
- Capital Finance
- Public School Facilities Funding
- School facilities
- School Finance
- School Finance Legislation
- Education--Finance--Law and legislation--Arizona.
- Education
- School facilities--Arizona--Finance.
- School facilities
- Educational equalization--Arizona.
- Educational equalization
Resource Type
Extent
ix, 110 p
Language
eng
Copyright Statement
In Copyright
Primary Member of
Peer-reviewed
No
Open Access
No
Handle
https://hdl.handle.net/2286/R.I.14368
Statement of Responsibility
by Kenneth R. Baca
Description Source
Viewed on January 15, 2013
Level of coding
full
Note
thesis
Partial requirement for: Ed. D., Arizona State University, 2011
bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (p. 81-85)
Field of study: Educational leadership and policy studies
System Created
- 2012-08-24 06:10:34
System Modified
- 2021-08-30 01:49:49
- 3 years 2 months ago
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