EDUCATION TEACHER BUDGET IN UNITED STATES

Education teacher budget in United States

Education Teacher Budget in United States

Equity and efficiency are crucial concepts in economics, so it is useful to begin by defining these terms. Two principles guide evaluations of the effect economic policies have on equity. The benefit principle is the viewpoint that it is equitable for citizens who benefit from government services to pay for them. The ability-to-pay principle is the viewpoint that it is equitable for a citizen's tax liabilities to be correlated with the citizen's economic resources. It follows that taxpayers with equal abilities to pay should be taxed equally (horizontal equity) and that tax liability should increase as ability to pay increases (vertical equity). Resources are allocated efficiently if and only if they are used where they have the highest social value.

A fiscal year is a 12-month period covered by an operating budget. The U.S. federal government's fiscal year begins on October 1 of each calendar year and ends on September 30 of the following calendar year. Before the beginning of a fiscal year, governments formulate planned operating budgets, which show planned expenditures and expected tax and fee revenues. However, some operating expenditures are difficult to plan for (e.g., disaster assistance), and tax and fee revenues are difficult to predict (e.g., sales tax revenue). Thus, within any fiscal year, actual expenditures may differ from plans, and actual tax and fee revenue may fall short of predictions. In all cases except Vermont, U.S. state governments are constitutionally required to adjust their operating budgets so that by the end of each fiscal year, actual expenditures do not exceed tax and fee revenue. Economists call this restriction the government's current budget constraint. Note that if expenditures equal tax and fee revenue, the state budget is said to be balanced. (Moir, 2003)

Teachers feel the brunt of educational budget cuts in many ways. In a field where in good times about 20% of teachers leave the profession in the first three years, budget cuts mean less incentive for educators to continue teaching. Following are ten ways that budget cuts harm teachers and accordingly their students.

The decades encompassing the 1980s to the present time have seen multiple reform initiatives in teacher education. This section addresses three of the most widely known, which have in common the goal of radically restructuring how teacher education is organized.

In 1983, a group of deans at research universities convened to discuss concerns about the quality of teacher preparation at their institutions. With funding from several private foundations and the U.S. Department of Education, several meetings were held for the purpose of articulating a reform agenda for teacher education. Tomorrow's Teachers: The Report of the Holmes Group, was published in 1986 and a second report, Tomorrow's Schools: Principles for the Design of Professional Development Schools, was published in 1990. Three key features characterize the changes recommended by the Holmes Group, which was named for Henry Wyman Holmes, the dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education in the ...