Equity and Efficiency in School Finance Reform: Competing or Complementary Goods?

Abstract

This issue of the Peabody Journal of Education includes 5 articles that address some of the most compelling, consistent, and complicated issues related to K-12 public school finance in the United States. In particular, they have much to say about the broad societal goals of equity and efficiency. Taken together, the articles provide a sense of where the field has been, where it is headed, and how we have gotten from here to there. They also provide groundwork for appraising the value of contemporary education policies in terms of their likely contribution to the goals of equity and efficiency. The pursuit of both equity and efficiency has an enduring history of influencing public school finance policy and research. And, as several articles in this issue make clear, these goals often pull in competing directions as reflected in the see-saw nature of the emphasis on each in education fiscal policy over the years. For instance, the 1980s brought a major shift from an emphasis on educational equity, which characterized school finance policy throughout the 1960s and 1970s, to an emphasis on efficiency and excellence. This reordering of national education priorities was influ-