Public School Finance Course Analysis

With all these issues in mind, I enrolled to the Penn State University in 2013 spring semester as a non-degree student and took several courses until my acceptance to the Educational Leadership program. During this period, I took three courses from Dr. William Hartman, Public School Finance, Technology Applications in Educational Leadership, and Financial Management in Schools. His courses allowed me to further immerse myself in school funding systems, models and finance issues both in theory and practice. The knowledge I gained from Dr. Hartman’s courses helped in shaping my research ideas which was in a nebulous state at the time.

I felt that, as a practicing professional in the field and a doctorate student, the two issues, basic education

I wanted to learn more on the literature about equity. (Augenblick, Myers, & Anderson, 1997; Odden, 2003; Sample & Hartman, 1990) provided an in-depth and descriptive analysis of school funding models in all 50 states and a simulation in Pennsylvania. Although I had some knowledge about student funding equity or inequity during my tenure as a business manager, I had little knowledge about adequacy levels of student funding. Especially Dr. Hartman’s course on Public School Finance allowed me to amplify my knowledge about adequacy level of student funding in school districts. School finance litigations and scholars have shifted their focus on adequacy for the last decade, in part, replacing equity problems. However, equity problems are still lingering around for schools in all states. Some authors (Augenblick et al., 1997; Odden, 2003) provided ideas about converting adequacy levels in to a funding formula; a remedy to cure both equity and adequacy. If the adequacy level determined to a level that is high enough to increase school funding for most school districts to a specific foundation level, it reduces the difference between the highest spending districts and foundation level districts considerably. This new funding level then resolves equity problems significantly. However, the states need to allocate more

(Hartman, 1988) allowed me to understand how states subsidize construction projects of school district. Even though publication date was about three decades ago, most of the information was still current and helpful. This was an important article for me as I am in a construction committee in my school and currently looking into options to expand our building. I thought that this would be a good topic for me to research if not now, possibly in the future after I earn my doctorate degree. Here is why I found this topic to be interested; in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the Department of Education guarantees construction bonds for school districts but does not provide same guarantee for charter schools. Perhaps this is because charter school contracts or charters are renewed every five years by their authorizer school districts. Therefore, there is a risk for guaranteeing a bond for a school that may not be around after some years. This situation compels charter schools to lease buildings they can find fit into their needs, often an old or unused, unwanted school district buildings or church buildings. Consequently, when students are used as unit of analysis, students who go to charter schools not only receives less spending per pupil compared to school districts but also deprived an appropriate school buildings because of systematic structure that does not allow or make it really harder