Presidential Essay

Carolyn D. Herrington

Department of Educational

Leadership and Policy

学习

Florida State University

Tallahassee, FL 32306-2540

cherrington@fsu.edu

THIRTY-SEVEN AND COUNTING:

HOW HAS AEFP EVOLVED FROM

ITS ORIGINS?

It has been a busy time for the Association of Education
Finance and Policy (AEFP). Over the past few years the
association has acquired a new name, a new journal,
and many new members. 这 2012 annual conference,
convened in Boston last March, proved to be the largest
conference in the association’s thirty-seven-year history,
和 556 members in attendance. The theme, selected
by incoming president Deborah Cunningham, was “Ed-
ucation Finance, 政策, and Practice: The Role of Ev-
idence in a Dynamic World,” which underscores the
contemporary challenge to the association: how to apply
an increasing abundance of information and sophisti-
cated analytical tools to produce the evidence needed
to guide decision making by educational policy makers
and practitioners.

The Boston meeting was notable not only for
the number in attendance. The unique qualities and
strengths of the association were in clear display: 文件
of unusual methodological rigor; an interdisciplinary
mix of academics from the social sciences, public policy
学校, and colleges of education; educational ﬁnance
professionals, policy analysts, and practitioners, a mix
rarely found in the same place; and sessions addressing
today’s hot topics as well as issues that have endured
over the years. Having said this, all indications are that
AEFP is what it has always been: a small, diverse group
of people tackling some really big problems.

Of particular note was a trend that has been growing
for years but has clearly come into full ﬂower: 大的

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HOW HAS AEFP EVOLVED FROM ITS ORIGINS?

number of empirically oriented presenters—many veteran members, 但
many more current or recent graduate students, early-career scholars at uni-
大学, think tanks, and state education departments, many relatively new
to the profession. They brought with them not only a healthy skepticism of re-
ceived wisdom but also a heady optimism that research matters—a sense that
the right analyses with the right data can yield insights into how to improve
education and the lives of those affected by the system.

The world is different today than when AEFP was founded. The current
generation of analysts and scholars has never known a world where the very
questions they are researching are not under continual discussion everywhere.
This includes the most inﬂuential policy circles and the media, including but
by no means limited to the daily front pages of the New York Times or the Wall
Street Journal.

Today’s analysts, particularly those in North America, have at hand troves
of data barely dreamed of by the handful of people who started the associa-
tion thirty-seven years ago. In only a few years, as almost all ﬁfty states bring
their data systems to full realization, the promise of data riches and analytical
prowess stretches far beyond the horizon. The same is happening in different
ways and at a different pace around the globe. Best of all, there is a world of
policy makers, 管理员, 教师, and parents who are hungry to under-
stand how education works, how it can work better, and how to best pay for it.
Though there was a particular analytical sparkle to the scholars and analysts
who attended the conference in Boston armed with new empirical tools, 它
is no less true that education in general has been front and center in the
consciousness of the United States and other nations for most of the past ﬁfty
年. This essay, adapted from my presidential address presented at the 2012
conference, looks back to the origins of the association, the issues that caused
it to come into being, and how it has developed over the past four decades.
In doing so I strive to identify what have been the enduring qualities of the
association and what has been and remains unique in its contributions.

BEFORE AEFA: 1900–1975
The American Education Finance Association met for the ﬁrst time in 1976 在
Nashville, Tennessee. 然而, almost a century of attention by academics,
school administrators, and policy analysts to the question of how to ﬁnance
education had preceded that ﬁrst meeting.

The need for analyses of education funding proved critical throughout the
二十世纪. The enormous growth in the population attending high
school in the ﬁrst two decades of the twentieth century in the United States
clearly set education as a central, and expensive, responsibility of governments.
As a ﬁeld of study, educational ﬁnance was pioneered by a very small number

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Carolyn D. Herrington

of university professors, all writing in the ﬁrst three decades of the twentieth
世纪. In an overview, Roe Johns at the University of Florida identiﬁed their
作品, all prior to 1933, as establishing the basic tenets of local and state
responsibility for public education (Johns 1969). The Great Depression of
the 1930s was a watershed for public ﬁnancing of schools, devastating local
and state budgets. The capacity of the local property tax as a base for funding
schools was thrown into question. By the time the United States emerged from
World War II, most states had to confront the need for a large-scale investment
in education and additional tax sources to pay for it.

But it was developments in the 1950s and 1960s that, at least in the United
状态, most clearly marked the need for a professional association dedicated
to better analyses and application of analysis to school ﬁnance issues. 这
enormous population growth of the Baby Boom required huge state and local
investments in new teachers and facilities. The growth of the middle class dur-
ing that time dramatically heightened expectations for the extent and quality
of its children’s’ education.

Urbanization and greater industrialization drove a number of changes.
Both led to increased inequities of resources derived primarily from local
property taxes. Disparities between property-poor and property-endowed dis-
tricts grew as the country became more urbanized. Urbanization also changed
the nature of public demand for education; in urban areas it was seen as more
critical to success in later life than it was in more rural areas, where education
had not been as critical. Clashes between urban and rural education systems
were further fueled by the changing politics of state governments. The Reynolds
v. 西姆斯 (1964) 我们. Supreme Court ruling (“one man, one vote”) shifted power
in state legislatures from rural to urban populations.

The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 1970s required the disman-
tling of entire systems, de jure state systems in the southern United States and
many urban areas across the country. 此外, it proved the basis for a
much wider expectation of equality of funding and of educational achievement
for all children from all backgrounds.

There were three immediate precedents for what became the AEFA: (1) 一个
annual conference hosted by the National Education Association (NEA) start-
ing in the 1950s; (2) an aggressive push by a national foundation to pursue
funding equity across the United States; 和 (3) a large federal project funded
by Title V of the U.S. Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) 在里面
late 1960s.

NEA Committee on Educational Finance

There were major discussions of the challenges in educational ﬁnancing as
a result of more than ﬁfteen years of ﬁnance seminars established by the

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HOW HAS AEFP EVOLVED FROM ITS ORIGINS?

NEA under the auspices of its Committee on Educational Finance.1 The ﬁrst
was held in 1958. According to George Babigian, the ﬁrst Executive Director
of AEFA, its purpose was to “provide a forum for the exchange of ideas,
讨论, and debate of issues for anyone and everyone interested in school
ﬁnance, kindergarten through grade school, public or private, internationally.”
The ﬁrst conference was held in Chicago on 22–23 May 1958. Two persons
from each state, one from the state department and the other from the state
NEA afﬁliate, were invited to attend. According to Babigian, “The conference
was a who’s who of school ﬁnance.” Over the next ﬁfteen years, these annual
conferences created a network of educational ﬁnance experts and a convening
of interested parties, such as legislators and legislative staff, state education
department heads and ﬁscal analysts, superintendents and district ﬁscal staff.
They were discontinued in the early 1970s, with the last conference held in
1972 (Babigian, personal communication, 2012).

Ford Foundation: 1970s

The work of the Ford Foundation was crucial to the development of a network
of scholars and an activist agenda across state ﬁnance analysts, 州法院,
and education leadership during the late 1960s and 1970s, conceptualized and
activated by James Kelly at the Ford Foundation. Starting in the early 1970s
and continuing for almost a decade, the foundation adopted a two-prong strat-
egy to develop the capacity to analyze and pursue changes in how states fund
教育, with the clear goal of equalizing resources for all children. 第一个
strategy was to train a generation of analysts with the knowledge and skills
to help states set up new school ﬁnance plans. Fellowship programs were
funded at key universities, including Berkeley, 芝加哥, Columbia, 斯坦福大学,
and Syracuse, resulting in a relatively tight network of advocates and schol-
阿尔斯. The foundation clearly stated that its intention was to produce a capacity
for change through attracting “ﬁrst-rate minds from law, political science and
economics” (凯莉 1980) but not to advocate any particular path for reform.
The second strategy was to support national and state groups through a series
of grants, which were given to groups such as the Lawyers’ Committee for
Civil Rights under Law, the National League of Women Voters, the Ameri-
can Association of School Administrators, the National Conference of State

1. The leadership of the NEA in school ﬁnance issues dates back to the early decades of the 20th
世纪. 在 1933, it convened a national conference and issued its ﬁrst comprehensive statement of
public school ﬁscal policy. The conference report recommended that a greater portion of the costs of
schooling shift from local to state governments, that each state develop a comprehensive plan for state
支持, and that the federal government increase its support for education. The NEA established
a standing Committee on Tax Education and School Finance in 1938. Its name was changed to the
Committee on Educational Finance in 1960.

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Carolyn D. Herrington

Legislatures, the Education Commission of the State, and the National Urban
Coalition. Grants were also given to state-level minority groups, public inter-
est law ﬁrms, broad-based school and citizens’ groups, and state governments
他们自己. The focus of the second strategy was speciﬁcally on reforming
discriminatory aspects of state school ﬁnancing (凯莉 1980).

National Education Finance Project

Around the same time that the Ford Foundation was creating a network of
analysts across the United States, the federal government was funding a large
multiyear study of education ﬁnance out of Title V of ESEA. According to its
directors, the project “represents the ﬁrst systematic effort to study compre-
hensively all state systems of school ﬁnance and to critique them in the light
of current educational needs and trends” (Johns, 亚历山大, and Rossmiller
1969, p. 162). Its three objectives were to identify, 措施, and interpret di-
visions in educational needs among children, school districts, and states; 到
relate variations in educational needs to the ability of the school district and
state to ﬁnance appropriate educational programs; and to conceptualize var-
ious models of school ﬁnance and subject them to consequential analysis in
order to identify the strengths and weaknesses of each mode (Johns, 亚历山大,
and Rossmiller 1969, p. 162). The principal investigator was Roe L. Johns, WHO
became AEFA’s ﬁrst president. The project director was Kern Alexander, 还
at the University of Florida, who subsequently served as president of AEFA
在 1989 and who started and still owns the ﬁrst journal afﬁliated with the
association, the Journal of Education Finance.

By far the most immediate impetus for forming a professional association
in educational ﬁnance was two now landmark court decisions, both handed
down in the early 1970s, that dramatically changed the range of considerations
required for state ﬁnancing and created a demand for analytical work and
well-trained ﬁscal and legal analysts. Those decisions ushered in a still active
stream of litigation, continuously applying pressure to states in educational
ﬁnance and fueling a demand for ﬁnance studies and reports. 第一个, 桑
Antonio Independent School District v. 罗德里格斯 (1973), held that equity in school
ﬁnancing was not implicitly or explicitly protected by the U.S. 宪法,
effectively foreclosing further federal court action. This ruling resulted in the
states being the locus of legal challenges to school funding. 第二, Serrano
v. Priest (1971, 1976), held that disparities in school ﬁnancing were in violation
of the California Constitution. Both these suits (and other related ones) led to
a series of equity-based challenges in state courts based on state constitutions.
In the period between 1971 和 1983, challenges to the school ﬁnance system
were heard by supreme courts in seventeen states (我们. Advisory Committee
on Intergovernmental Relations 1990).

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HOW HAS AEFP EVOLVED FROM ITS ORIGINS?

FROM NEA CONFERENCES TO THE ESTABLISHMENT OF AEFA
The NEA held its last conference in 1972. The National Education Finance
项目 (NEFP) was well positioned to help with forming a national organi-
扎化. Already in its network were many of the most inﬂuential people in
education ﬁnance. After the NEA annual conferences were discontinued, 这
NEFP stepped in and helped organize and, with support from some other
来源, ﬁnance the continuation of conferences in 1973, 1974, 和 1975.
These activities kept some of the momentum of the NEA ﬁnance seminars
and helped maintain a network of education ﬁnance experts in what turned
out to be a transition period.

在 1975 conference, the participants decided to formally organize an
independent association. According to Babigian, leaders in the ﬁeld of school
ﬁnance were invited to attend a summer organizational meeting held in St.
Louis to put together the constitution and bylaws of this new association and
create the certiﬁcate of incorporation, which was ﬁled in the state of Florida
(charter number 7–34,218) 在 31 十月 1975, under the ofﬁcial association
name American Education Finance Association, Tennessee. AEFA met for the
ﬁrst time in 1976. Roe L. Johns was named president.

The founding fathers and the ﬁrst Ofﬁcers and Board of Directors were:

Ofﬁcers:

Roe L. Johns, 总统, University of Florida

William P. McLure, Vice President, University of Illinois

Dewey H. Stollar, Secretary-Treasurer, 田纳西大学

Directors:

S. Kern Alexander, University of Florida

George R. Babigian, New Trier High School

Charles S. 本森, 加州大学

Robert O. Bothwell, School Finance Reform Project

Fred G. 伯克, New Jersey State Department of Education

Jose Cardinas, Intercultural Research Association

Jean M. Flanigan, National Education Association

G. Alan Hickrod, Illinois State University

Jerome M. 休斯, State Senator from Minnesota

James Kirkpatrick, American Association of School Administrators

Betsy Levin, Duke University Law School

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Carolyn D. Herrington

Wendell H. Pierce, 各州教育委员会
(Babigian personal communication, 2012)

In many ways, AEFA reﬂected its roots in the NEA Finance conferences.
The speciﬁc focus of the new AEFA was to provide a forum for the discus-
sion of key educational ﬁnance issues and give guidance to state legislatures,
state departments of K–12 and higher education, and local school districts
as they managed their publics, their taxation policies, and their educational
机构.

From its inception, AEFA was a place where organizations could send their
representatives to discuss and share research on educational ﬁnance issues.
The newly formed board and the association had formal linkages with key
constituency groups such as the Association of School Business Ofﬁcers, 这
American Association of School Administrators (the administrator associa-
的), and the teacher associations. The ﬁrst board had an elected member of
a state legislature, an appointed member of a state department, and represen-
tatives of national associations that encompassed all the players, 例如
各州教育委员会. Membership, as can be seen in the ﬁrst
board, included administrators as well as academics, state agency personnel,
state legislators, 律师, and representation from organizations that worked
with states and state budgeting, such as the Education Commission of the
状态.

It was a time of intense interest in education ﬁnance, an appetite by pol-
icy makers for analyses, and a change in education policy. Collective bar-
gaining was beginning to spread in the teaching profession and across the
状态. Education groups such as NEA that had a broad-based membership
began to splinter, with teachers and administrators developing their own
协会.

AMERICAN EDUCATION FINANCE ASSOCIATION
The association has met annually since 1975. It continues to be a relatively
small association, with meeting attendance breaking four hundred only once
before the Boston meeting in 2012. 然而, the issues it deals with are no
less foundational to the well-being of society as they were when the association
ﬁrst met. The analytical work of its members affects the allocation of billions
of dollars annually to education. The research is used daily by policy makers,
and it is cited daily in the most inﬂuential political and policy circles.

Borrowing from NEA and NEFP

Issues have remained the same to a surprising degree, even as methodological
advances occur and educational systems evolve. Core issues are still equity,

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HOW HAS AEFP EVOLVED FROM ITS ORIGINS?

adequacy, 表现, 使用权, and quality and the relations among them,
particularly between cost and performance, across control costs and perfor-
曼斯, and between the source and the use of funds. Questions that were
asked forty years ago have not changed. We continue to ask “How do we fund
教育? For whom? At what level and to what end?” even as new questions
are added.

The organizational framework has changed little over the past thirty-seven
年. Members remain a mix of academics, policy makers, and practitioners.
The ﬁrst president was a university professor but had served in two different
state departments.

会议

The main activity of the organization was and remains the annual conference.
In that way it is very similar to the NEA annual ﬁnance seminars. 尽管
over the decades the AEFA saw a growing role for sophisticated quantitative
工作, the conference also had room in the program for papers primarily
descriptive in nature and those focusing on practical operational problems.
Similar to academic conferences, a review process was in place but was less
formal than conferences for members of academic disciplines’ organizations.
Time and place are allotted for more open-ended discussions or debates. 这
program includes a mix of program formats in addition to the normal paper
sessions typical of academic conferences. Other activities include workshops
to introduce new techniques or information to members, and there is a long-
standing annual workshop on recent activities about school ﬁnance litigation.

Membership

A hallmark of the conference is a continuing mix of academics, elected and
appointed policy makers, and practitioners. 然而, while academics today
do not make up the majority of attendees, they are the single largest category
of members. 例如, at the NEA annual conference in 1968, about one-
third of the participants were from universities; 在 2011 AEFP conference,
49 percent were professors.

杂志

The journal is in many ways the public and permanent face of the association.
The ﬁrst volume of Journal of Education Finance displayed the intentions of the
association’s founders in its content and in the various categories of articles.
The bulk of the issue was devoted to feature articles reporting new research
ﬁndings on educational ﬁnance. The focus was predominantly on U.S. K–12
public schooling and drew largely from the ﬁeld of public ﬁnance. 但有

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Carolyn D. Herrington

was more, 也: articles on higher education, 例如, and case studies
drawn from international education.

The ﬁrst issue included ﬁve feature articles. These topics would not be
too different from what one might ﬁnd today: a discussion of the use of cost
indices, analyses of efﬁciency and effectiveness in the face of declining college
enrollments, a proposal for school size incentives in state aid formulas, 和
challenges in ﬁnancing education for handicapped children.

There were other categories beyond research. A comment section included
two essays, one on foundation programs and one on school ﬁnance in Canada.
There was a section dedicated to ﬁnance law. The issue also included four book
reviews, one on higher education ﬁnancing. Another example of the mix of
interests found in the Journal can be seen from a 1978 问题, which contained
an article on tax equity, an analysis of New Jersey school ﬁnance challenges, A
description and analysis of the process of political coalition building for school
ﬁnance reform, and an article on the ﬁscal implications of higher education
governance models. These issues and the scope of interests have not changed
substantively today.

Two areas that were consistently well covered in the ﬁrst few decades and
that were in many respects core to the association and its founding were a focus
on state litigation and its impacts, and how states implemented court-ordered
remedies. Another topic that may be less common today is analysis designed
to better understand the business of running the ﬁscal side of educational
系统. 秋天 1984 issue of the Journal included a special section on
the business of running and budgeting educational systems, with articles on
student housing, auditing, and dealing with reductions in force.

There are four features that made AEFP unique then and now. 也许
the central one is the development and application of social sciences’ analyt-
ical tools to better understand (and operationalize) the allocation of critical
resources to the education of children, educational institutions, 和社会
at large. The second is the exploration of education issues from a breadth of
disciplines such as philosophy and history, economics and political science,
sociology and their applied branches, organizational theory, public ﬁnancing,
public administration, and educational administration. Third is the extension
of the analytic reach beyond funding educational institutions in order to ex-
plore the connections across other policy areas such as child development,
social welfare, and family and community welfare. 最后, the activities of the
association, the conferences, the journal, and the composition of the board all
have a strong ameliorative impulse. The members have an interest in not just
understanding but improving educational delivery, educational policy, 和
societies that the institutions serve.

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HOW HAS AEFP EVOLVED FROM ITS ORIGINS?

Recent Changes: A New Journal and a New Name

By the year 2000 there was clearly a more mature analytical frame driving
educational ﬁnance research. A look at the program today shows a dizzying
array of issues under analysis and under discussion. These include analyses
of state funding formulas, updates on current school ﬁnance litigation, incen-
tive structures built into teacher compensation and development, curricular
问题, costs of competition, instructional delivery models, and teacher prepa-
配给, 除其他外. New analytical tools have allowed analysts to probe
deeper into the ﬁnancial implications of how children learn, how instruction is
delivered, and how performance is measured. 在 2006 the association began
publishing a new journal, 并在 2010 it changed its name.

New Journal

Interest was growing in a journal not limited to school ﬁnance but one that
developed the linkages between ﬁnance and policy. According to the request for
proposals sent out by AEFA, the intent was to publish a “high-quality research
journal with a focus on educational ﬁnance that ties together educational policy,
practice and research in the ﬁeld.”2 There was an interest in associating with
a ranked academic press. (The former journal had been privately owned.) 这
association entered into an agreement with MIT Press to publish Education
Finance and Policy, and the ﬁrst issue appeared in 2006.

New Name
在 2010 the board changed the name of the association from the American
Education Finance Association to the Association of Education Finance and
政策. The preferences of the membership were measured in a survey in
哪个 83 percent supported the change. Then president Susanna Loeb noted
this intention to link policy and ﬁnance in the name change. “Education ﬁ-
nance issues . . . are not solely about funding mechanisms and alternative
approaches to taxation. Teacher’s decisions about where to teach and how to
teach strongly affect the cost of education. 而且, both federal and state
policies now link governance and instructional practices directly to ﬁnance.
Key education ﬁnance policymakers also are key policymakers for personnel
政策, governance policies, and curricular and instructional policies” (Loeb
2010, p. 2). The name change also reﬂects the continuing interest in under-
standing educational ﬁnance across the globe, recognition of the increasing
analytical work being done by international professionals, and the improved
data that allow for comparative work in ﬁnance and policy.

2. 参见http://mitpress.mit.edu/journals/efp/cfp.pdf.

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Carolyn D. Herrington

A New Empiricism

As AEFP prepares to celebrate its fortieth birthday in Washington, 直流, 在
2015, its recent accomplishments in the application of robust data sets with
increasingly ﬁned-tuned data and rigorous analytical techniques are on bright
展示. To some degree these accomplishments are part of a broader trend that
accelerated markedly over the past decade but that also dates back before that.
During the 1970s and 1980s, researchers had at their disposal a fair degree of
educational data, but it was primarily aggregated only at the district level. 这
data described educational inputs, student demographics, and basic school
特征. Some aggregated outcome data were available from states that
had statewide testing programs. Much of the research focused on the equity of
state ﬁnance systems. Data continued to be primarily limited to district-level
aggregated data even as the research questions expanded to include issues
of efﬁciency as well as equity and other areas, such as district consolidation.
In the 1990s school-level data emerged, allowing much deeper analysis of
成本, efﬁciency, and effectiveness, though often still limited to cross-sectional
analyses rather than longitudinal perspectives.

It was in the 1990s and increasingly in the 2000s that longitudinal data sys-
tems became more widely available. The level of data also became more reﬁned:
school-level data were becoming available and large student-level data systems
were under development. There was also development of statewide student
achievement data as state and federal accountability systems deﬁned speciﬁc
standards for achievement and established normative measures through stan-
dardized assessments. All this was further facilitated by the development of
more sophisticated technology to analyze large-scale databases and a concur-
rent lowering of costs, making the research open to a greater number of
研究人员.

The expansion of data that allows probing key questions in educational
ﬁnance has been met by some additional recent capacity-building efforts. Just
as much of the development of school ﬁnance in the 1960s and 1970s was
abetted by substantial project funding from the U.S. government and private
philanthropy, a number of efforts in the 1990s and 2000s were intended to
provide an enhanced technical capacity and better-trained researchers. 两个
these were initiatives of the federal government. The ﬁrst was an effort from the
我们. 教育部 (USDOE) in the 1990s and early 2000s, 在下面
the leadership of William Fowler, to encourage more research on school ﬁ-
nance issues through organizing and making available federal data sources on
school ﬁnance and to commission periodic reports on current issues in school
ﬁnance. A second was the Predoctoral Interdisciplinary Research Training
Programs in the Education Sciences, from the USDOE Institute of Education
科学, which offered generous fellowships for predoctoral and postdoctoral

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HOW HAS AEFP EVOLVED FROM ITS ORIGINS?

training at select universities across the country. The programs focused on
quantitative skills central to the social sciences and on issues important to
school ﬁnance and policy. The program at Michigan State University provides
a doctoral specialization in the economics of education; the one at Stanford
draws from economics, 社会学, 政治学, and psychology, 还有
as education. To these capacity-building initiatives were added the efforts of
many states over the years not only to expand and reﬁne their administrative
data sets on education but also to increase the capacity to draw on them as
a resource for policy planning. New York State stands out for the latter with
the establishment of a research consortium that has met over the last two
几十年, convening researchers and commissioning reports. These efforts are
being further ampliﬁed through state grants to develop large-scale educational
data systems as part of the U.S. Race to the Top program. Many of these re-
searchers, trained in new programs or applying data from new and expanded
state and federal databases, attended and presented at AEFP conferences and
published papers in the new journal.

最后, two other developments merit mention because their presence at
AEFP is remarkable. One is the expansion of the concept of resources beyond
its more traditional focus on money to fund education in the early years of
AEFP to the application of resources as more direct inputs. Teachers and the
effectiveness of their instruction, quantiﬁed in value-added measurements,
have become a particularly lively area of research among AEFP members. 这
direct application to policy through innovations such as performance-based
teacher evaluation and compensation has been one of the most active recent
strands in the annual conferences of AEFP.

I would be remiss not to mention the continuous expansion of interest
at AEFP beyond just K–12 education and beyond the U.S. and Canadian edu-
cational systems. In addition to the frequent participation of members from
加拿大, recent organizational efforts are deliberately trying to broaden the
membership and the questions researched internationally. From its begin-
nings AEFA always spread its arc of interest more broadly than just K–12
教育. 然而, that trend is even stronger today. Higher education is
a particularly well-covered area, and there is a growing group of members
looking at early childhood education policy.

Not So New Questions and Ever Elusive Answers

While the research that can be pursued using new data and methods, 也许
more than anything else, marks the distinctiveness of the association’s confer-
ences and journal today, it is also true that the goals for the association have
not changed, nor have they gotten any easier.

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Carolyn D. Herrington

The recent contributions of members across the disciplinary and profes-
sional landscape—such as public ﬁnance scholars, labor economists, 和波尔-
icy students—will need to be supported by perspectives from other areas in
order to reap greater beneﬁts. 例如, political science and sociology are
two areas that might help explain observed behavior. We also need the perspec-
tives of students of organizational behavior. There is a striking need to better
study both the ﬂow of resources deep within institutions and the behavior of
those who administer them. We still need to better understand the institutions
whose ﬁnances we are studying.

There is no lack of interest in educational ﬁnance and policy. 实际上, 这是
noisy out there and getting noisier. The din of advocates, partisans, and litigants
is often ampliﬁed by a media that thrives on controversy and disagreement.
We need to be very purposeful at AEFP as we design conference programs and
organize sessions to make sure we are pulling in the perspectives and insights
of policy makers, practitioners, 和教育工作者, as well as researchers.

AEFP still aspires to provide perhaps the rarest of commodities—good,
empirical analyses, thoughtful commentary, and measured policy recommen-
dations, all in one place. The initial convening intention articulated in 1975 经过
the founders remains as valuable as ever.

参考
Johns, Roe L. 1969. State ﬁnancing of elementary and secondary education. In Educa-
tion in the states: Nationwide development since 1900, edited by Edgar Fuller and Jim B.
皮尔逊, PP. 177–214. 华盛顿, 直流: National Education Association of the United
状态.

Johns, Roe L., 亚历山大, S. Kern, 和理查德·A. Rossmiller. 1969. National education
ﬁnance project. In Fiscal planning for schools in transition. Proceedings of the NEA Com-
mittee on Educational Finance, edited by National Conference on School Finance, PP.
162–70. 华盛顿, 直流: National Education Association.

凯莉, James. 1980. Looking back, moving ahead: A decade of school-ﬁnance reform. 新的
约克: Ford Foundation.

Loeb, Susanna. 2010. President’s message. AEFP Newsletter Fall: 1–3. Available www
.aefpweb.org/sites/default/ﬁles/AEFA_FALL_2010.pdf. Accessed 17 九月 2012.

我们. Advisory Committee on Intergovernmental Relations. 1990. The structure of state
aid to elementary and secondary education. 华盛顿, 直流: 我们. Advisory Committee
on Intergovernmental Relations.

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