The goal of this brief is to provide school district and school staff with tools to help make more effective and efficient use of resources, particularly American Rescue Plan ESSER III funding. ESSER III funding offers districts and schools an opportunity to not only support their immediate needs of safely reopening schools to in-person instruction and addressing learning loss due to COVID-19-related interruptions to schooling, but also leverage opportunities for planning and restructuring for long-term improvement. Cost-effectiveness (CE) analysis is a tool that may be used by districts and schools to compare the costs and effectiveness of two or more program alternatives with similar objectives. CE analysis requires both a detailed accounting of the costs of each alternative and a common outcome that may be compared across the alternatives under consideration. This brief provides an introduction to CE analysis, including the five steps for conducting a CE study.