This article applies the logic of the “improved” school finance, arguing the need to understand how resources are used at the school and classroom levels. While California policies and most court cases have been seriously inadequate from this perspective, the recent case of Williams v. California provides new opportunities for equity since it follows the logic of the “improved” school finance.

Based on English experiences, the author describes four different models of observing classrooms, varying in their value for opening up teaching to greater discussion and improving the quality of instruction.

Alarm about "new students" flooding into the schools is hardly new: concern about lower-class and minority children is a persistent strain, and in a nation of immigrants each wave of arrivals has led to various efforts to cope with them. Not surprisingly, the dominant responses have been contradictory. On the one hand there have been powerful efforts to include "new students," to provide access, and to find new resources for them. The other response has been to accommodate "new students" through differentiation by developing new purposes for schooling and by varying its content for groups of students with supposedly different needs and interests. The result is that access to schooling for all students has been preserved, though "schooling" means very different things for different students. But in all these debates one aspect of schooling has rarely been examined: the conventional pedagogy of instruction.

The "crisis" that many perceive in early childhood programs is first and last an issue of funding, and hopeful talk about "the decade of the young child" should not obscure how limited the gains in public funding have been. I conclude the chapter by suggesting a new justification for public funding — similar to the justifications for Social Security — that might help solidify support for young children.