Thoughts on Program Equity: Productivity and Incentives for Performance in Education

Abstract

William Clune 's case for "adequate" standards contains the following agenda: to raise and meet higher standards for student performance through combining larger compensatory expenditures with increased site-based management in disadvantaged schools. This agenda toward adequacy illuminates a general problem: the problem of productivity in educational spending. The author is skeptical that a mere infusion of money will result in proportional improvement in student performance. As long as public organizations continue to operate within the traditional model of the base budget, without developing a systematic measure of cost-benefit relations, there will be no increase in understanding how existing resources are best used to improve learning. The Clune proposal invokes the need for research focused on schools that consider how base expenditures on such factors as staffing, professional development, and curriculum can be altered to produce drastically different relationships between resources and performance.