Policy Challenges Surrounding the Shift Toward Outcome-Oriented School Finance Equity Standards

This article examines the implications of progress toward understanding more about the transformation of resources into educational outcomes for thinking about equity standards in educational finance. A distinction is drawn between two types of progress that are being made: (a) gains in understanding the ingredients of effective schooling and (b) gains in reaching consensus about the purpose of schooling and the ability to measure educational outcomes along multiple dimensions. The article draws attention to the potential for these developments to point in contradictory directions for thinking about equity standards and proposes steps that can be taken to resolve the difficulties. The proposed next steps involve generating a new class of performance indicators that combine elements of opportunity to learn and performance standards and the conduct of collaborative studies wherein the focus is on the discovery of site-specific solutions.