The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) commissioned the papers in this publication to address advances in measuring education inflation and adjusting for it, as well as to examine the emergence of a new focus on school spending, rather than school district spending, as well as new, private sources of funding for public education, and a review of the status of assessing educational productivity. The first two papers continue the NCES tradition of commissioning papers to address the measurement problems of the education finance research community. The other papers examine the relationship between school district and school spending, and private sources of funding public education, of which surprisingly little is known. The final paper examines the existing attempts to estimate the cost of educational outcomes, and the implications for policymakers and researchers. Following an Introduction and Overview by William J. Fowler, Jr., papers included, in order, are: (1) Adjusting for Differences in the Costs of Educational Inputs (Eric A. Hanushek); (2) An Alternative Measure of Inflation in Teacher Salaries (Dan Goldhaber); (3) School Districts and Spending in the Schools (Amy Ellen Schwartz); (4) New Revenues for Public Schools: Alternatives to Broad-Based Taxes (Michael F. Addonizio); and (5) Modern Education Productivity Research: Emerging Implications for the Financing of Education (David H. Monk and Jennifer King Rice). (Individual papers contain references.).

The National Center for Education Statistics commissioned the papers in this publication to address education-finance issues of interest to the education-finance community. Although teacher salaries rose between 1980 and 1997 by 120 percent, that is only equal to a 19 percent increase after removing inflation, or a little over 1 percent per year. Moreover, starting salaries have changed little in comparison to average salaries. Another paper discusses school financial statements, which are only one source of information that is relevant to assessing a school district's finances. School-district employee pensions, often the largest long-term obligations, may not appear in these reports. A third paper discusses two approaches to reporting school-level finance information, and how to make inflation and geographic cost adjustments in education. Adjustments for inflation and geographic differences are not easily implemented in education, because most of the costs in education are in personnel, rather than in things, which are easier to measure in terms of quality and quantity. Measuring cost differences in education is even more difficult that measuring changes in automobiles, for example. The final paper deals with the consideration of who will be the primary users of school-level data, what new data they need, and for what purposes. The authors suggest that principal stakeholders should be schools and school districts, state and national policymakers, researchers and policy analysts, and the public, represented by parents and taxpayers, special interest groups in education, and the financial community. (Each paper contains references.) (DFR)