Lisa Snell was the director of education and child welfare at Reason Foundation, a nonprofit think tank advancing free minds and free markets.
Snell has frequently testified before the California State Legislature and numerous other state legislatures and government agencies. She has authored policy studies on school finance and weighted student funding, universal preschool, school violence, charter schools, and child advocacy centers.
Snell is a frequent contributor to Reason magazine, School Reform News and Privatization Watch. Her writing has also appeared in Education Week, Edutopia, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, San Francisco Chronicle, Orange County Register, Los Angeles Times, and numerous other publications.
Ms. Snell is also an advisory board member to the National Quality Improvement Center for the Children's Bureau; is on the charter school accreditation team for the American Academy for Liberal Education; and serves as a board member for the California Virtual Academy.
Before joining Reason Foundation, Snell taught public speaking and argumentation courses at California State University, Fullerton. She earned a Master of Arts in communication from California State University, Fullerton.
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Student-Based Budgeting Newsletter, November 2016
"Many superintendents don’t have access to the financial data they need to make critical budgetary decisions.”
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Student-Based Budgeting Newsletter, September 2016
“When districts pay for teachers using average salaries, it creates a loophole that allows for vast differences in dollars spent per student at the school level."
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Student-Based Budgeting Newsletter, August 2016
“Education finance is one of the big civil rights issues of our time."
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Student-Based Budgeting Newsletter, July 2016
“If you expect us to do something different you have to give us the opportunity to craft something.”
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Student-Based Budgeting Newsletter, June 2016
“So, while the research continues to focus on aggregated finance databases, the answer to the problem of why funds are poorly linked to student outcomes lies more in how funds are realized at the school level.”
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How to Fix the Hiring Process for Teachers
To help solve teacher shortages, school districts need to improve the ways they identify and select the talented teachers of tomorrow.
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Student-Based Budgeting Newsletter, March 2016
"We believe instructional needs should drive funding and budget decisions, not the other way around."
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Student-Based Budgeting Newsletter, January and February 2016
“So where the public hears about efforts to close achievement gaps between minorities and white students or between higher-performing and lower-performing students, in truth different parts of the finance system are directly at odds with those stated obje
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Green Benefits of School Choice
School choice offers emerging evidence that it can benefit students and their communities.