In this dissertation, I seek to understand encroachment within school finance, wherein school districts must divert unrestricted, general education revenues to compensate for unfunded, mandated special education costs. I claim that encroachment in itself is not an issue ⁰́₃ special education students should be funded, and it is fair for local school districts to contribute to that funding ⁰́₃ but rather that inequities in encroachment lead to significant disparities in the financial burdens school districts face. As encroachment requires districts to divert dollars that would otherwise be spent on general education services, inequities in encroachment affect not only special education students, but general education students as well. Research on encroachment is limited, and this dissertation adds to the literature by (1) measuring encroachment within Michigan public school districts and describing trends over a seven-year time span; (2) tying policy and district characteristics to encroachment; (3) investigating funding approaches as potential encroachment equalizers; and (4) looking for trends in districts' expenditure responses to encroachment. To make the first contribution, I create a novel panel dataset which brings together federal, state, and newly gathered local special education revenues. I then run standard OLS regressions of the novel encroachment measure on a range of policy and district characteristics to identify potential predictors. To look at potential funding policy solutions, I simulate flows of special education revenues to local districts under varying assumptions and calculate a measure of equity for the resulting encroachment. Lastly, I identify and estimate a two-way fixed effects regression model to determine if there are systematic patterns in how districts reorganize expenditures to make up for unfunded, mandated special education costs. I show that encroachment has remained relatively constant at the state level over time, with statewide encroachment fluctuating around
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