From Candidate to Classroom: Research-Based Practices for Recruiting and Hiring Highly-Effective Teachers
Category: Staffing, Finance, and Operations
This paper introduces a structural, mechanism-based framework for understanding how inequality in education emerges from fiscal design rather than from demographic patterns alone. I propose a Two-Axis Fiscal Architecture in which educational opportunity is shaped by (1) horizontal flows of capital across tax jurisdictions (the X-axis), divided into cross-border movement (X1) and cross-regional movement (X2), and (2) intergenerational after-tax capacity (the Y-axis). These two flows jointly determine how public and private capital enter different educational pathways.
While existing school-finance literature often treats income as a demographic variable, this paper reframes income differences as products of fiscal architecture: tax rules, eligibility criteria, budget transfers, and jurisdiction-level constraints. I argue that educational inequality cannot be understood without clarifying how money is collected, redistributed, and translated into rule-based access points.
The framework offers a replicable way to examine institutional tension across educational systems—including K–12, postsecondary, and adult education—providing a basis for future measurement tools such as the Institutional Tension Index (ITI).
Keywords
Education finance; cross-jurisdiction fiscal flows; intergenerational capacity; institutional analysis; school boundaries; public capital.
Education level
Topics
Document Object Identifier (DOI)
10.26300/c5g8-yd27
