Financing Better Schools

Too often, traditional methods of paying for schools come up short.

Public school finance systems are in flux.

Historically, states have focused on how to distribute money equitably across districts, with far less attention to what that money bought or the results it produced. Now that states have set ambitious performance goals for students—and the federal No Child Left Behind Act requires all public school students to reach those targets in reading and mathematics by 2013-14—the push is on to link money to student performance.

Quality Counts 2005: No Small Change, Targeting Money Toward Student Performance, focuses on the burgeoning efforts to link funding to educational outcomes. Nearly $500 billion in combined federal, state, and local money is spent on precollegiate education in the United States each year, with nearly half the total...