With heightened expectations and greater funding as backdrop, one would expect elected officials and educators to ensure that America's substantial investment in public education is used effectively to accomplish its ambitious new goals. Conventional modes of funding school improvement, however, such as across-the-board salary increases, class-size reduction, and targeted spending programs, have resulted in greater costs without offsetting gains in performance; and both high- and low-spenders get good and bad outcomes. Something is preventing educators and elected officials from translating resources into results. Part of the problem is that today's finance systems were never designed to support such uniformly high levels of student learning, particularly when the task calls for closing achievement gaps and making the greatest gains with students who have been poorly served. The policy challenge for elected officials is to remove the structures, rules, or practices that prevent educators from using resources effectively. From a systems standpoint, decision makers can support continuous improvement by making four key changes: (1) Deliver resources transparently and flexibly; (2) Focus and enable educators' work; (3) Expand resource knowledge and experiment with new methods; and (4) Redesign resource accounting and accountability. (Contains 5 notes.)