School administrators in California and other states have been recalculating data to comply with a new federal law requiring the reporting of spending, including actual, not average, teacher salaries, at the school level. A study of a pilot project of states’ efforts by the National Center for Education Studies found that the work, if done right, could be a useful tool for developing state education policy. Many  participating states found they were able to report complete expenditure data for a high percentage of their schools. Although there are “numerous inherent challenges,” evidence suggests “the feasibility of collecting and reporting school-level finance data of reasonable quality is relatively high.”