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What’s more important to a superintendent: a math program shown to give a bigger boost to students’ math skills in the next two years or one that gives a smaller improvement but fits the district’s budget for five years? Questions like that have become steadily more common as school leaders grapple with years of shrinking budgets. Still, it can be difficult to understand the expenses that lie beneath an intervention’s sticker price or the resources that may mean the difference between a promising intervention working on paper and working in the classroom. That’s why foundations, policymakers, and even the U.S. Department of Education’s research agency are pushing for more tools and research to help educators understand the costs of education programs.

A new study of six school districts that made heavy investments in strengthening their cadre of school leaders underscores the key role principals play in their schools’ academic success. The report, by researchers at RAND Corporation, looked at the six-year, $85 million “principal pipeline” initiative supported by the Wallace Foundation. Schools that got new principals in 2011-12 as part of the pipeline initiative outperformed other schools in their states that were not in the program by 6.22 percentile points in reading and 2.87 percentile points in math three years after the new school leader was hired, researchers found. The program was also relatively affordable for districts, the report found. Over five years, the initiative cost $210 per student if looking at its impact districtwide and $373 if looking solely at students in schools with principals who received the full “treatment” of the initiative.

Oakland Unified recently attracted statewide attention when its teachers won higher pay, smaller classes and more staff support after a seven-day strike. As attention turns to how to pay for the four-year contract, Oakland is again in the spotlight for the unprecedented help it has received from the Alameda County Office of Education to overhaul its fiscal practices. A county team is providing assistance and training in the district’s business office amid budget cuts and a central office reorganization that includes the elimination of the chief business officer position. While the county office routinely helps districts with their finances, the assistance being given to Oakland is intense and unprecedented among districts statewide, said Michael Fine, CEO of the Fiscal Crisis Management and Assistance Team, or FCMAT, a state agency that assists districts with financial matters.

Education Week spoke with William Hite earlier this month about his tenure, continuing challenges the district faces, bright spots, and advice for other urban district leaders confronting conditions like the ones he encountered when he first arrived in Philadelphia. “We do an annual budget because we have to by law. But we do a five-year financial plan because we want people to see what five years out would look like if in fact we don’t fix the revenue problem or the expenditure problem,” said Hite.