This quantitative study seeks to understand the effects of public school funding, expenditures, school, and neighbor-hood demographics on 2011 Transitional Colorado Assessment Program (TCAP) tests. Primarily, this thesis tries to answer whether or not public school funding has a significant effect on TCAP scores, how demographics shape both funding and TCAP scores, and how neighborhood and school demographics relate to each other. With public schools in Colorado as the unit of analysis, unemployment and education levels are used in conjunction with school demographics including student race, poverty, number of students, and student-teacher ratio are used to determine differences throughout the state and how they translate to academic performance. TCAP scores are used to gauge disparities in academic performance throughout the state. This study confirms many of the existing literature claims that student personal background, along with home-life, and institutional quality of schools exhibit some considerable effect on student performance uncovering unique findings as well.