Redistribution and the Education Bloc Grant: An Analysis of State Chapter 2 Allocation Formulas

This paper has two major objectives. The first is to document the degree to which state allocation formulas under the Education Consolidation and Improvement Act (ECIA) Chapter 2 bloc grant promote traditional equity or redistribution objectives. The second is to explain factors associated with the variation among states in the redistributive nature of their Chapter 2 formulas. Decision rules are initially posited and then employed to measure roughly the redistributive orientation of state formulas in all 50 states. We then use the redistribution measure as the dependent variable in a multiple regression analysis to address the paper’s second objective. The independent variables used represent common but often competing notions of the contexual factors that are hypothesized as being associated with redistributive policies.