Sunday, May 22, 2016

Blog Post Week 3: E-Book Research


During my assignment for this week, I chose a book entitled To What Ends and By What Means, edited by Gloria M. Rodriguez and R. Anthony Rolle. It was very difficult to find an e-book that at anything to do with my topic, as it is somewhat specific. This book doesn’t analyze the costs of education, but it analyzes what a community needs in its schools based on its socioeconomic status. With this analysis, it determines where the budget should be allocated in order to provide a beneficial education to students in certain communities.
            The knowledge I gained about my topic is that it takes further analysis of what a school really needs for effective education of its students, rather than just putting a budget towards certain costs. It is not as simple as teachers get paid X amount and supplies cost Y amount, so X+Y equals the cost of running a school. It is a matter of money being allocated correctly towards certain things and having the funds to do so.

            A really cool search strategy that I found to be helpful is adding an asterisk to the end of a search term. For example, I would search “budget*” and the results would contain “budget”, “budgeting”, “budgets”, etc. It seemed really helpful that the search engine did this for me, because that way I didn’t have to search for different words.
The difficulty I had during my search experience is that there is a lack of books related to my specific topic of educational budgeting. Much of the content that is related to my topic is legislature and news articles.
What I’d like to find out as I continue researching my topic is the rough percentages of where different parts of the budget go (i.e. salaries, supplies, technology). I have heard that too much money goes to administrators compared to other aspects of a school and its district.

Rodriguez, G. M., & Rolle, R. A. (2007). To What Ends and By What Means?: The Social Justice Implications of Contemporary School Finance Theory and Policy. New York: Routledge.

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