A Jaundiced View of "Adequacy"in School Finance Reform

Abstract

Discussions of school finance have been seriously hampered by an inability to relate inputs to student performance. Because spending and resources are not closely related to student performance, discussions that concentrate on the distribution of educational inputs bear little relationship to the distribution of educational outputs. This fundamental problem makes a definition of "adequacy" in funding and resources virtually impossible. Balanced against this, problems with our schools are very important, and active policy to improve the situation is called for: The types of policies that hold the largest hope involve different incentive schemes based on student performance. Such schemes are generally not compatible with policies involving adequacy or input floors.