William T. Hartman

Supplemental/Replacement: An Alternative Approach to Excess Costs:

Excess cost has been a prominent method of funding special education for many years and it is used by the federal government and by many states. The common approach is to calculate excess cost as the difference between special education cost per student and regular education cost per student. Despite its widespread use, there are both conceptual and practical difficulties in this approach. This article proposes a new operational definition of excess cost, which is based on programs and services rather than accounting calculations.

State Funding Models for Special Education

The purpose of this paper is to provide special educators and education policymakers with a conceptual and technical framework for examining alternative approaches for funding special education. Four fundamental policy issues are posed that are central to funding special education; the resolution of these questions will guide the selection of an appropriate funding approach for special education within a state. To assist in evaluating special education funding systems a full range of criteria are proposed. Finally, alternative funding approaches for special education are identified and analyzed for their fiscal and programmatic effects using both the policy questions and criteria as standards.

A model for school-level resource reporting: Benefits and challenges

This paper describes a model for assessing and reporting schoollevel resources. State and local decision-makers have been seeking ways to obtain such information for more than a decade, but there is as yet no easy, accessible way to do so and no way to satisfy both internal and external users of the information. The model, based on case studies in Pennsylvania (with successful replication in New York), resolves many of the issues. The seven principles that guide the model are explained, challenges in developing school-level reports are generalized, and resolutions to the challenges in three states are compared. The conclusion draws out implications for the future of regularly collected school resource data.