The South Carolina School Boards Association has recently released a new education funding plan that would cost nearly $1 billion in new education spending each year. This goal would be achieved by imposing a statewide tax rate on personal property and distributing the revenues generated from the tax equally among the state’s school districts. However, this program rests on a heavy assumption, namely that higher funding equals better educational outcomes. While this assumption seems intuitive and seems to be often invoked in education debates – at least implicitly – it rarely comes with data to back it up. In order to test this assumption, we’ve compared the total (local, state, and federal) proposed funding for South Carolina school districts, as given in the 2010-2011 state budget, with several different measures of the performance of schools and students.