According to reporter Peter Schmidt:

Schemes for tying state support of public colleges to performance tend to share the same flaw: They are vulnerable to dying off before they can show how well they work.

Such was the consensus among several experts on state higher-education policy who took part in a panel discussion of performance-based financing systems last week at the annual conference of the American Educational Research Association.

Of 26 states that have adopted performance-based college-financing systems since 1979, 12 have scrapped them, according to research presented at the meeting. Of the remaining 14 states, two -- Colorado and New Mexico -- still technically have such systems in place but no longer use them to allocate funds. Two other states -- Virginia and Washington -- have created and then ditched performance-based financing systems, only to establish new ones down the road, according to the paper, by Kevin J. Dougherty, an associate professor of higher education at Columbia University's Teachers College, and Rebecca S. Natow, a doctoral student at Columbia.

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