Educational reformers emphasize the need for renewed commitment to schooling - a commitment that is often translated into an appeal for spending more money on schools. But, in fact, the nation has been spending more and more to achieve results that are no better and perhaps worse.

• Between 1960 and 1990, student performance on such tests as the SAT and the National Assessment of Educational Progress declined.

• Yet real (inflation-adjusted) public spending on elementary and secondary education rose from just over $50 billion to almost $190 billion.

• Real per-student spending more than tripled - from $1,454 in 1960 to $4,622 in 1990.

• As the public school system is now organized, some schools appear to use money and resources effectively while others do not. And school administrators are not monitoring the performance of their programs or the effectiveness of resource use effectively enough to know what does and does not work.

Take class size, for example.

• The pupil-teacher ratio in the United States has steadily declined, from 35-to-1 in 1890 to 28-to-1 in 1940 to 20-to-1 in 1970 and to less than 16-to-1 in 1990.

• But econometric and experimental evidence shows that across-the-board reductions in class size are unlikely to yield discernible gains in overall student achievement.

Individual tutoring can substantially improve the achievement of poorly performing primary school students, while other students can be placed in larger classes without jeopardizing their achievement - thus holding overall cost constant. Indeed, in Japan teachers and administrators expressly trade large class sizes for more time for teacher preparation. U. S. schools have so far made little effort to learn which uses of resources - for smaller classes or other purposes-best promote student achievement.

The best way to reform our schools is to hold overall real spending constant while school administrators learn fiscal discipline. They must learn to:

• Consider trade-offs among programs and operations;

• Evaluate performance and eliminate programs that are not working.

• Seek out and expand on productive incentive structures and organizational approaches.

Source: Eric A. Hanushek, "Making America's Schools Work: This Time Money Is Not the Answer," Brookings Review, Vol. 12, No. 4, Fall 1994, Brookings Institution, 1775 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20036, (202) 797-6000.