ABSTRACT
Money problems have long plagued America's rural schools. This chapter shows that substantial benefits can accrue to rural communities by centralizing the collection and distribution of educational revenues while concomitantly decentralizing control over educational programs and expenditures. It reviews briefly the history of school finance, discusses in some detail recent reforms in school finance systems in several states to provide a basis for analyzing rural school finance problems and discussing means for solving them. The chapter analyzes their effect on the special problems of rural areas, and suggests additional measures to benefit rural schools in the future. The major school finance problem in rural America remains the uneven geographic distribution of wealth measured both by property and income. A second large issue is the relative sparsity of population, which leads to high expenditures for services like transportation and higher per pupil expenditures for some educational programs.
