This book presents ways in which school administrators can identify and redirect school funds to improve student performance. It quantifies the degree of overall financial inequality in the country using figures for all districts and shows how education dollars are currently spent, why these dollars are ineffectual, and how different and more high-performance notions of school organization can improve the productivity of these dollars. It discusses the management strategy that school systems can use to improve results and outlines some of the current primary approaches to school-based budgeting. For the benefit of comparison, the text examines the school-based reform programs in England and Australia and links these with dramatic school autonomy. The best ideas from these countries are then incorporated into a proposal for structuring a school-based financing system in the United States. With these examples, the book demonstrates how schools can use resources more effectively than they currently do and identifies the new roles and responsibilities that arise when a district adopts a true site-based decentralization strategy. (Contains an index and approximately 210 references.) (RJM)