A Flexible-Weights School Effectiveness Index

Ellis Eff ()

No 200403, Working Papers from Middle Tennessee State University, Department of Economics and Finance

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: Data Envelopment Analysis; Educational Quality; Effectiveness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004-09
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mts:wpaper:200403

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