Student-Based Funding: How to Improve Transparency and Accountability in Arizona Public Education Finance

Like most states, Arizona finances its public schools through the application of complex formulas, some of which depend on enrollment and some of which rely upon categories of spending. One result of this many-layered approach is an inability to easily determine how much money is tied to a single student in a single district or how school and district balance sheets are affected as students move around the state. In times like these, when education dollars are increasingly scarce, it is imp...