Bruce Baker is Professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning at the University of Miami and Co-director and creator of the School Finance Indicators Database. Widely considered the leading expert on the funding of public education, he has been researching, writing and consulting on school finance for over 25 years. His most recent books from Harvard Education Press include Educational Inequality and School Finance: Why Money Matters for America’s Students, and School Finance and Education Equity: Lessons from Kansas. A forthcoming book from Harvard Education Press will focus on housing discrimination and school funding inequality, coauthored with Matt Di Carlo of the Albert Shanker Institute. He is a recently inducted Fellow of the American Educational Research Association, and serves in advisory and research fellow roles for the National Education Policy Center, Learning Policy Institute and Brown’s Promise. He has consulted on state school funding policy design with Vermont, New Hampshire, Kansas, Texas, Colorado, Wyoming, Washington, Virginia, Missouri, Delaware, Oregon, testified in numerous state and federal courts on school funding inequalities and his work on racial inequalities in school funding has been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court. He is presently collaborating with the World Bank on a global indicator system for evaluating educational adequacy. He occasionally blogs at Schoolfinance101.com.
https://kansaspublicradio.org/kpr-news/kpr-presents-bruce-baker
Baker combines historical background, legal analysis, and political and economic contextual data—along with a gleaming wit—to present a thorough, enlightening narrative of Kansas’s K–12 funding journey.
Bruce Baker draws on his many years of research to destroy the myth that money in education doesn’t matter, and convincingly argues that equitable and adequate funding are prerequisites for an effective education system.
Helen (Sunny) ladd (back cover notes)
- Full Length CV
- Google Scholar
- News Coverage (all)
- Tech Crunch Profile
- Teachers College (Columbia) alumni profile: Amicus Not-So-Brief
- Rutgers Experts in the News
- AERA Fellow (2024)
- Learning Policy Institute Senior Fellows
- #59 in the 2025 Education Week/RHSU Edu-Scholar Top 200
The tricky thing about a smarty pants like Baker is he uses statistics to back up his claims.
Justin Kendall, The Pitch (Kansas City)
School Finance 101 