Public school finance equity in United States metropolitan areas 1970 to 1990: Developing a social structural theory of resource distribution

The purpose of this thesis is to develop and test a social structural theory of educational resource distribution. This is done first through a synthesis of existing research, and followed by a quantitative analysis of school finance data for public primary and secondary schools in U.S. metropolitan areas in 1970, 1980 and 1990.;The theoretical synthesis draws on four general research areas: Sociology of education (emphasizing the historical and social structural context of schooling), political economy (introducing the role of state structure and political intervention), demography (providing tools for measuring population composition and schooling demand factors), and school finance equity research (refining the idea of fiscal equity and its methods of measurement). The resulting theoretical model is then evaluated in light of the quantitative analysis of an empirically rich data set.;The data set used in this second portion of the thesis is actually a merger of school finance data and data describing the social structural contexts of school districts. The resulting data contain a rich set of information about the social context of school resource distribution.;The first step in the quantitative analysis of this data is the calculation of standard measures of fiscal equity. These measures are grouped according to the facet of equity they measure. Hypotheses about the nature of fiscal inequity and its historical persistence are tested. These hypotheses are tested again after adjusting for differential student need. The second portion of the quantitative analysis focuses on modeling social structural determinants of educational resource distribution. This modeling allows a more direct testing of the hypotheses generated in the theoretical section of the thesis. The results of this hypothesis testing are then subjected to tests of appropriate specification, influence of outlying cases, ill-conditioned data and sample selection bias (using bootstrap and robust regression techniques).;The final component of the thesis explores the limitations of the study and suggests ways in which this work might influence future research.