After a decade of dormancy there is suddenly a great interest among educators and policy-makers in public school finance, spawned by: successful court decisions in several states overturning existing state public school finance formulas; a popular book alleging more severe educational segregation than in 1954; congressional proposals for school finance studies; national education goals; and financial exigencies of a prolonged recession. This paper explores the disparity between the types of school finance questions that have been recently raised by these developments and the ability of any national data collection based upon existing state administrative records to address those questions. The paper examines a proposal for new collection mechanisms and the collection of extraordinary fiscal data compared with extant collections, and assesses the improvement in the ability to answer policy-analytic questions. Eight tables and one figure are included. (19 references) (Author)