@EdWorkingPaper{ai26-1629,
title = "From the Right to Education to the Distribution of Resources: Testing U.S. School Finance Equity Metrics in Mexico, Brazil and France",
author = "Bruce D. Baker",
number = "1629",
year = "2026",
month = "October",
URL = "http://www.edworkingpapers.com/ai26-1629",
abstract = {Most national constitutions and international treaties guarantee a right to education, and the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights has warned that sharp geographic disparities in spending may constitute discrimination. Yet rights monitoring rarely tests whether resources within a country follow children's needs. U.S. school finance research offers a transferable method for doing so. A framework that moves from risk analysis (which conditions predict lower outcomes?) to spending analysis (do resources rise with those conditions?) to cost modeling is applied, with public data only, to Mexico's federally paid basic-education payroll, Brazil's municipal school networks and France's centrally allocated teaching hours in public lower-secondary schools. Within states or académies, resources at the 90th percentile of need are 0.77 times those at the 10th in Mexico, 0.96 in Brazil and 1.15 in France. Risk analysis is feasible in all three, but outcome data limit it in Mexico. Cost-based adequacy, the indicator most directly tied to rights, requires cost models that are feasible in Brazil, possible in France in teaching hours and not yet possible in Mexico. The paper proposes a minimum data standard for monitoring the equitable financing of the right to education.},
}