Dedication
In memory of Steven D. Gold, 19451996
This publication is dedicated to Steven D. Gold, who may be best known for his compendium for the American Education Finance Association (AEFA) of Public School Finance Programs of the United States and Canada, which has become the standard in the field for those who wish to compare state education aid programs. As one of the few state/local fiscal experts in the United States who had an abiding interest in elementary and secondary education finance, his comments were frequently quoted on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. Although he always claimed that education was not his specialty, his work was held in great regard by the education finance research community, and he served as an AEFA board member for many years.
Extremely prolific, Dr. Gold had written 17 books about state and local government finances, including The Fiscal Crisis of the States, published in 1995. Dr. Gold was a senior fellow at the Urban Institute. For 6 years prior to his move to Washington, D.C., he was the director of the Center for the Study of the States at the State University of New York in Albany. He also was a professor there of public administration and public policy.
He was a graduate of Bucknell University in Pennsylvania and received masters and doctoral degrees in economics from the University of Michigan. He taught economics at Grinnell College and Drake University, both in Iowa, before becoming a senior fellow and director of fiscal affairs at the National Conference of State Legislatures in Denver.
Those of us who knew him were always awed by his quick intelligence, his quiet reserve and his insightful humor despite two epic battles with cancer, the first of which he thought he had won, only to have the disease return after a decade. His optimism and bounteous research and publications while engaged in attempting to subjugate his illness serves as a paradigm for those of us who achieve far less, with far fewer ordeals. There can be no greater tribute to this man, and his work, for others in the education finance research community to attempt to emulate him.
