امور مالی آموزشی برای حمایت از استانداردهای یادگیری بالا: یک ترکیب

By 1997, the New York State Board of Regents had required that all students would be subject to the rigorous requirements of the Regents exams in order to graduate from public high schools. These high learning standards were to be fully implemented by 2005. Realizing that these standards would require substantial increases in the performance of students in virtually all school districts, and that such an effort could likely mean changes in aspects of the educational finance system, the Regents commissioned independent research on this issue. This paper provides background and context to the research symposium, Educational Finance to Support High Learning Standards. It also briefly summarizes the papers in this volume that were part of this symposium.

The New York State Board of Regents 1997–98 Educational Finance Symposium addressed the topic of school finance for high learning standards. How should New York's educational finance system be restructured to achieve uniform high learning standards for all students, especially in schools where student achievement historically has been low?1 To explore this topic in detail, a panel of experts in educational policy and school finance were assembled. New York State has a long history of reaching out to the academic research community to help inform the policy process. This is the fourth education finance symposium. Each has provided insights that have been important to the development of educational policy in New York. The New York State Board of Regents, as the policy setting body for education in the State, has required that all of the State's students receive a challenging academic curriculum and be able to attain high learning standards. This agreement has taken the form of detailed curriculum changes and high stakes learning standards for all students. The centerpiece is a requirement that all students must pass five Regents examinations to graduate from high school. Historically, Regents exams have been a set of rigorous curriculum-based external exit exams that have largely differentiated college-bound high school students from their peers. The new Regents standards for all students are acknowledged to be of comparable quality. They will be phased in beginning with the graduating class of 2000, and fully implemented for the class of 2005. The topic of this symposium is particularly timely. The new learning standards represent an enormous change for many students, teachers, administrators, and support staff in New York. Meeting these standards will require that every aspect of the educational system be aligned with the standards. Aligning the finance system is of special importance. More broadly, many states are developing high learning standards of one form or another. Although some states have begun to think about how their school finance systems could support the work of their standards, most have not. Thus, the work of the panel should have applicability beyond New York. The panel met twice. At the initial panel meeting April 11–12, 1997, panel members were presented with the Commissioner of Education's charge. The panel also received background briefings from State Education Department staff and heard comments and questions from New York State legislative and agency staffs, and representatives of various educational constituency groups. The authors of the policy briefs reconvened October 28, 1997 for presentation of their work to representatives of New York's educational policy community. The panel received feedback from expert respondents and from the audience in general discussion. Based on that feedback the following policy briefs were prepared. The table below (Table 1) provides a list of the panel members and their policy brief titles included in this volume. This paper provides background for the policy briefs and synthesizes their findings. The remaining sections include a general discussion of methods to align the goals of the system's stakeholders with the standards, a discussion of how other states are adjusting their finance systems to align them with recently adopted standards-based reform, and a synthesis of some of the major results of the policy briefs.

The research performed for the symposium, Educational Finance to Support High Learning Standards, has important implications for educational policy in New York and elsewhere. This approach represents a relatively unique collaboration between state policy makers and the academic research community. As we attempt to further improve the educational outcomes of students, these collaborative efforts need to become more common. They provide an important mechanism for these two groups to communicate with each other in substantively important ways. Policy makers communicate their questions and concerns and researchers attempt to address these issues through well-grounded research. These interactions create a doorway through which both groups can move more freely and consequently learn a great deal more about educational policy.