The purpose of this dissertation is to analyze, from a Public Administration (PA) perspective, the provision of public education using the portfolio model, in which a school district employs autonomy-accountability tradeoffs to oversee a collection of schools operating under a variety of governance structures. The study relies on the New Public Management (NPM) literature as the foundation for a research design intended to explore correlations between the contract-based provision of public education and school-level variations in spending equity and efficiency through a case study of Denver County 1 School District (DPS). The NPM lens serves to locate the dissertation in the PA field and informs the focus on DPS. The portfolio approach to education incorporates a range of operation and management models, but charter schools are its cornerstone. To date, much of the research on charter schools has been framed in competitive or even confrontational terms. NPM, however, is more suggestive of the cooperative arrangements in place in DPS, where the district maintains exclusive chartering authority, has actively promoted the autonomy for accountability exchange, and has received national attention for its well-developed portfolio of schools. The dissertation tests the DPS portfolio approach against the classic NPM research questions: Does it work better? Does it cost less? Here, "working better" is defined in administrative terms: meeting district-determined goals relative to student-based resource allocation. "Costing less" is tied to efficiency, in terms of school performance and the ratio of administrative to instructional spending. Answering these questions requires school-level financial data, and DPS is an early adopter of new federal financial transparency rules. The district's publicly available accounting dataset for the 2018-19 school year is the primary data source for this analysis. While the data reveal no major differences across governance types in terms of the alignment between spending and student demographics, they do suggest that management organizations leverage flexibility to reallocate funds. In addition, variations in efficiency are tied to lower spending in charter schools rather than significant differences in performance. Above all, the study reveals a need for improved financial data to facilitate effective comparisons. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com.bibliotheek.ehb.be/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]