In many of the United States, attempts to reform the funding of public education to reduce disparities among school districts have been disappointing. For this study of state aid-to-education in Connecticut, a system dynamics model of local district budgeting behavior was formulated, replicated seven times to represent all the school districts in Connecticut divided into seven clusters, and linked to a state-aid sector that dispenses aid according to the state's current guaranteed wealth formula. Simulations of a single cluster and the seven-cluster model suggest that the guaranteed wealth formula will not, by itself, narrow the gap in per-pupil expenditures in rich and poor districts, as intended. The study described is a relatively pure case of policy modeling designed not to confirm hypotheses but rather to draw inferences from puzzling sets of assumptions about state and local behavior. Reflecting on this case, we suggest six conditions that appear to indicate that a policy problem is ripe for the sort of contingent, inference-generating analysis illuminated by the Connecticut study. Some speculative methodological connections to cognitive science are also suggested."

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Date created

• 1986

Type

• Document

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• Processing documentation available at: https://wiki.albany.edu/display/SCA/Processing+Ingested+Digital+Files

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• Creative Commons BY-NC-ND Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International

  
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23d738ba88f8333bc39725f9cb5bd0b8

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a6ba3d432669bb4e7e5d1d631a535030

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Collection

System Dynamic Society Records

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Collecting area

• This collection is part of the University Archives