Queensbury, a small town in the Adirondacks, spends less money on each student than any other public school district in the state. Bridgehampton, a resort town in Long Island, spends six times as much. But when it comes to statewide test scores, it’s hard to tell the difference between the two.

In Queensbury, which spent $8,553 per student in the 2004–05 school year, more than 80% of fourth-graders passed state reading exams that same year and more than 90% passed the math tests. The same is true of Bridgehampton, which spends $51,828 on each student, according to a July 2005 state report to the governor and the legislature.

The comparison raises a fundamental question coming to a head next week in what may be the last hearing in the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit: Does money matter when it comes to student performance?

Supporters of the lawsuit, which was filed in 1993 to force the state to spend more on New York City public schools to remedy inequities, say it does.

“You can’t do anything if you don’t have the money,” the senior economist at the Fiscal Policy Institute, Trudi Renwick, said. “But it has to be well spent and well distributed.”

In contrast, the lawsuit’s opponents, who are coming out with a book this week outlining their case, say money has nothing to do with improving student performance.

“What we’ve found over time is that money is neither necessary nor sufficient to ensure high performance,” a senior economist at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, Eric Hanushek, said. He is the editor of “Courting Failure,” a book coming out Monday that is critical of lawsuits like the Campaign for Fiscal Equity.

“Some schools spend a lot and get good performance and some spend a lot and get bad performance,” he said. “If you go ahead and try to adjust for what the kids look like. … It doesn’t help the picture, you get the same picture.”

The state has already pledged an additional $9.2 billion in capital costs to New York City schools, but has yet to pay between $4.7 billion and $5.63 billion in operating aid ordered by an appellate court – the issue coming up in the hearing on Tuesday. In front of a state appellate judge, the plaintiffs will repeat their arguments that the state is not fairly distributing funds to school districts, shortchanging students who live in places where high poverty rates combined with high costs of living make it more expensive to instruct students. The lawsuit demands that the state change its funding formula to send more money to places where there is greater need.

Campaign supporters say New York City, where 59% of fourth graders passed reading tests and 77% passed math tests, is one of those places. The city spends $12,896 a student, according to the state report, although some argue that understates the actual spending. City fourth graders scored worse on reading tests than students in all of the top 10 districts in the state for per pupil spending, but they also scored worse than students in all but two of the bottom 10 spenders. In math, the city scored worse than all but one of the 10 districts that spend the least on pupils – all less than $10,000 for each student.

The lawsuit’s supporters say the city doesn’t have a chance against places like Wyoming, a rural county in Western New York. Even though it spent the least in the state on instruction per student, $4,269, it came out way ahead of the city, which spends $7,663, on test scores.

“If you live in Wyoming, the cost of hiring a teacher is not much,” the director of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, Geri Palast, said.

In Wyoming, 5.8% of families live below the poverty line, according to the 2000 census, while in New York City, 18.5% of families live in poverty. Comparing the city to districts with mostly white, middle class, rural populations to New York City, with its large population of low-income students, special education students and English language learners, is like comparing apples to oranges, Ms. Palast says.

Most of the highest-spending school districts are even tinier than the low spenders, with student populations ranging between 12 and 352. They must pay for teachers in each grade even though there are only a handful of students per class. Most are also located in areas of Long Island where many residences are summer homes and property taxes, along with living costs, are high.

Opponents of the lawsuit agree with its supporters that the high spending districts are anomalies. But helping the city catch up to their high scores is still the goal, and with the end of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity in sight after 13 years, the debate about how to reach it is heating up.

The president of the United Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, says funding should also be allocated to attract and keep qualified teachers in places like New York City, where students have more problems and are harder to teach.

An analyst at the Manhattan Institute, Sol Stern, who is a contributor to “Courting Failure,” says that even as spending per pupil doubled in New York City over the past decade, performance hasn’t improved.

“If you watch what happened in New York City education budgets, you’ll see that pupil spending went up,” he said. “And eighth grade reading scores are as flat as they ever were.”

The lawsuit’s supporters respond that it’s not just how much money, but how you spend it – and the debate goes on.