This policy brief outlines how national education accounts (NEAs) are created, and why they are a vast improvement over current financial tracking systems in the education sector. Examples from the health sector illustrate the benefits of national accounts for improving public services, and their ubiquity highlights the poor state of affairs of…

The United States currently spends a good deal more on education per student than most industrialized nations, yet testing shows that achievement has not kept pace with spending. Nevertheless, school administrators continue to press for greater federal spending and claim that reforms cannot be implemented otherwise.