IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/telpol/v33yi1-2p54-67.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Impact of school district demographics and financial status on E-Rate funding: Analysis of Pennsylvania data for 1999 and 2004

Author

Listed:
  • Jayakar, Krishna
  • Park, Eun-A

Abstract

The E-Rate program was mandated by the 1996 Telecommunications Act to bridge the gap in telecommunications and internet access between rich and poor communities in the United States. Though the funding process embraces specific formulas to direct support at the most needy schools and school districts, a concern has been raised that the complex, multi-stage application process may prevent some school districts from availing themselves of E-Rate funds due to lack of technical expertise and administrative support. The objective of the paper is to assess the cumulative impact of these two contradictory effects. Changes in funding patterns over time are also examined. Data on all E-Rate projects where the recipient is a school district were collected for two years, 1999 and 2004, for the state of Pennsylvania. Results show that E-Rate funding was significantly positively correlated with the poverty rate and percentage of minority students fulfilling the policy intent, but school districts receiving more revenue per student also obtained higher E-Rate support. Location too was found to be a significant predictor of E-Rate funding. The policy implications of these findings are discussed in the conclusion.

Suggested Citation

  • Jayakar, Krishna & Park, Eun-A, 0. "Impact of school district demographics and financial status on E-Rate funding: Analysis of Pennsylvania data for 1999 and 2004," Telecommunications Policy, Elsevier, vol. 33(1-2), pages 54-67, February.
  • Handle: RePEc:eee:telpol:v:33:y::i:1-2:p:54-67
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030859610800102X
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:telpol:v:33:y::i:1-2:p:54-67. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/30471/description#description .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.