Forthcoming at AJE | More Money Is Not Enough: (Re)Considering Policy Proposals to Increase Federal Funding for Special Education by Tammy Kolbe, Elizabeth Dhuey, and Sara Menlove Doutre.

There are long standing concerns about the sufficiency and fairness in federal funding for special education programs. In response, the Biden-Harris Administration has proposed significant new funding for state and local grants authorized by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). The proposals assume, however, that the current formula will be used to distribute funding to states. In a study forthcoming at AJE in November 2022, authors Tammy Kolbe, Elizabeth Dhuey, and Sara Menlove Doutre, evaluate whether this formula results in a fair allocation of federal special education funding among states and simulates how potential future funding increases would be allocated under current law.

The authors write, “We find that the existing formula results in substantial disparities among states in available funding and systematically disadvantages large states and states with more poor, disabled, and non-white children. Moreover, we show that simply adding increasing federal funding without considering the formula used to calculate state grants will perpetuate existing funding disparities.”

Click on the link to read a preprint of this full length American Journal of Education article, which will be published in November in the first issue of volume 129.

Kolbe, Tammy, Elizabeth Dhuey, and Sara Menlove Doutre. (Forthcoming 2022). More Money is Not Enough: (Re)Considering Policy Proposals to Increase Federal Funding for Special Education. American Journal of Education 129 (1).