The purpose of this study was to advance our understanding of the original legislative intents of the Instructional Facilities Allotment (IFA) and to evaluate the IFA policy in achieving its goals. The study seeks to identify the original legislative intents of the bill that led to the creation of this program. The study also describes the evolution of the program from the passing of the bill through inception of the program to gauge whether the policy satisfied those intents since its inception. Interviews were conducted with state-level officials, leaders, and legislators, as well as those affiliated with the litigation that led to the drafting of this legislation. These interviews were conducted to identify the original legislative intents of the bill that led to the formation of the policy. More specifically, this study sought to address the following questions: 1) What is the social political history of school finance in Texas in context with which the Instructional Facilities Allotment (IFA) policy was developed? 2) What were the legislative intents of the IFA? 3) Were the legislative intents achieved? A mixed method approach, employing both qualitative and quantitative research methodologies, was used in this study to evaluate the IFA policy. The data analysis yielded two over-arching themes from the interview responses relating to the research question “what were the original legislative intents of the IFA?” A policy that was both legally defensible and politically responsible were two emerging themes identified in this study. Legislators aimed to keep the state out of court or have a policy that would be considered constitutional should facilities funding be challenged again through litigation. In addition, there was a desire among legislators to act in a manner that satisfied both their moral responsibility and political obligation. While the themes are two separate ideas, the analysis seems to support that one was possibly dependent on the other. The theme of politically responsible seems to be in response to, or in conjunction with, the notion that the primary motivator was to introduce a facilities funding program that was ultimately legally defensible. Furthermore, responses and data collected in regards to the third research question illustrated how both legislative intents seemed to be achieved initially, but the efforts deteriorated over time leading to a decline in it continuing to meet the intents.

abstract: ABSTRACT In Roosevelt v. Bishop (1994), Arizona public school districts and parents challenged Arizona's school financing system arguing that it was not "general and uniform" as required by the Arizona Constitution. The purpose of this study was to analyze Arizona's Students Fair and Immediate Resources for Students Today (Students FIRST) legislation, the remedy that resulted from the Roosevelt decision, empirically, and longitudinally. Three types of statistical analyses were conducted on a sample of 165 public school districts. Fiscal neutrality was measured for each of the eleven years of the study, to assess the association between the per-pupil Students FIRST funding level and the per-pupil property wealth. Multiple regression analysis was also conducted to assess if both property wealth and district size were associated with the distribution of Students FIRST funding. Finally, I analyzed the eleven-year average of the total Students FIRST funding distributed to school districts and assessed how the plaintiff districts ranked in the distribution. Overall, the findings revealed that Students FIRST met the fiscal neutrality standard in some, but not in all the categories and years of this study, per-pupil property wealth was only weakly related to, and district size was not associated with, Students FIRST funding. The analysis of average funding suggested that some property rich school districts benefited most from Students FIRST. These results suggest that the traditional measures used to assess the fiscal neutrality of operating funding may not be appropriate for assessing the fiscal neutrality of capital finance reforms. While the results of this study provide some suggestive evidence that Students FIRST did not fulfill the Court's mandate, additional research is needed as to whether or not Arizona's capital finance system has resulted in disparities in funding that fall short of the constitutional standard. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ed.D. Educational Leadership and Policy Studies 2011