ABSTRACT
Over the past 35 years, researchers have devoted signifi cant effort to developing ways to measure two important goals of state school fi nance systems: the promotion of equity and, more recently, the provision of adequacy. Equity, as the term is traditionally used in the school fi nance literature, is a relative concept that is based on comparisons of spending across school districts. An equitable fi nance system is one that reduces to a “reasonable level” the disparity in spending across a state’s districts. Adequacy, in contrast, is an absolute concept that requires that spending reach some minimum threshold level in each district. An adequate school fi nance system is one that provides suffi cient spending to give students in each district an opportunity to meet state standards of performance. Thus, adequacy focuses only on the bottom part of the distribution of spending, with no attention to variations above the threshold needed for adequacy. Although general defi nitions are straightforward, quantifying the measures needed to judge either the equity or the adequacy of a school fi nance system is a challenge.
