Lotteries, Litigation, and Education Finance

In 1993, the state of Georgia instituted a lottery that earmarked new funds for instructional and capital expenditures in public schools. In that same year, Tennessee began court-ordered education finance reforms that were also designed to promote instructional and capital expenditures. Using district-level panel data, this study presents empirical evidence on how these disparate policies influenced the patterns of educational revenues by source and expenditures by function. The results suggest that both state policies increased the state aid to the poorest districts and promoted some spending on the targeted functions. However, the results also suggest that these reforms influenced spending in several other functional areas.