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Just in time to help education leaders who must decide how to spend the stimulus money, the Century Foundation is publishing a book on the impact of extra funding on student achievement in poor school districts.  The book focuses on New Jersey's Abbott School Districts, which benefited from court-mandated efforts to close funding gaps between poor and wealthy communities.

The book's findings are, by the author's own admission, unsurprising. Citing "fairly dramatic" improvements in New Jersey test scores, the book concludes:

When additional funds are concentrated on supporting and enhancing teachers’ efforts to assess the needs of their students and tailor their instruction to those needs, dramatically better results are possible. If no coherent plan for improved classroom instruction is implemented, more money makes no difference, and can, instead, produce confusion and declining performance.

I haven't yet gotten my hands on this book, so I cannot yet vouch for its quality. Still, it seems especially timely in light of current debates over the stimulus.