School and district leaders make annual decisions about investing their budgets in a multitude of educational programs. Policy directives set expectations for investing in programs that show evidence of improving student outcomes. However, evaluating many simultaneously-implemented programs under typical school operating conditions is challenging. We investigated three methods--cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA), program value-added analysis (VAA), and academic return on investment (AROI)--to assess how each one fares against three criteria: rigor of methodology, difficulty of execution, and usability of results for decision-making. We apply each method to three programs implemented in a large, U.S. school district: Reading Recovery, Restorative Practices, and school nurses. We concluded that, while AROI suffers from methodological limitations and should not be considered definitive evidence on program performance, its value lies in the fact that it can be calculated for any academic program on a timely basis to inform annual budget decisions. Program VAA is useful for evaluating many programs at once in order to identify interventions that perform particularly well or poorly, thereby meriting closer scrutiny. Combining CEA's more rigorous approach to estimating costs with AROI's more feasible methods for estimating program effects may represent a useful synthesis of methods for evaluating district programs to help inform decisions about whether to continue, discontinue, or scale up a program. [This is the online version of an article published in "Leadership and Policy in Schools.".]