A Flexible-Weights School Effectiveness Index

Accountability reforms have led to a bewildering array of public school performance measures. Policy makers, parents, and the public would often like to use this information to rank schools by differing degrees of effectiveness. Combining measures from different performance dimensions into a single...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inIDEAS Working Paper Series from RePEc
Main Author Eff, E Anthon
Format Paper
LanguageEnglish
Published St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis 01.01.2004
Subjects
Data envelopment analysis
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Summary:Accountability reforms have led to a bewildering array of public school performance measures. Policy makers, parents, and the public would often like to use this information to rank schools by differing degrees of effectiveness. Combining measures from different performance dimensions into a single index should be done in such a way that the resulting index is fair to each school, gives each school the incentive to change in the most desirable directions, and reduces the confusing mass of information to the simplest possible ordinal rank differences. This paper proposes a flexible weights approach, based on a modification of Data Envelopment Analysis. The resulting index maximally reduces information, is fair, and allows policymakers some discretion in guiding the direction schools take in their improvement.