What role does a person's support for local educational control play in determining her attitude towards equity-minded school finance reform? This article reports estimations of binary and ordered probit models of two state public opinion polls and discusses newspaper coverage from the same two states to determine if and how local control has such an effect. The results from both analyses show that a person's commitment to local financial control is a consistent predictor of her evaluation of finance reform but that her commitment to the democratic virtues local governance can provide is not. These results can help predict when attitudes about local control will and will not affect people's evaluations of other education policies. (Contains 2 tables.)