Good Schools, Good Students? Measuring School Performance
With Diverse Students: Abstract

Funded by the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Education Research and Improvement (OERI) Field Initiated Studies Grant, June 2001 - May 2004.

Leanna Stiefel and Amy Ellen Schwartz, Co- Principal Investigators, Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, New York University, in conjunction with Ross Rubenstein, Georgia State University, Jeff Zabel, Tufts University, Hella Bel Hadj Amor and Dae Yeop Kim, research associates, Wagner School.

Leanna Stiefel: http://homepages.nyu.edu/~ls11
Amy Ellen Schwartz: http://www.nyu.edu/wagner/faculty/schwartz.html

While measures of school performance are increasingly being used to guide school improvement, reward successful principals or teachers and assist parents in choosing schools, relatively little attention has been paid to constructing and choosing appropriate performance measures. Instead, the wide variety of measures used by public school systems across the country reflects, in large part, a combination of happenstance, history and convenience. Unfortunately, there are significant differences in these measures, both practically and conceptually, and the differences are likely to be most important in schools and school systems serving diverse populations of students. The substantial and growing diversity in public school students across the US generally, and in troubled urban schools specifically, makes it particularly important to identify appropriate and useful methods for measuring school performance, even when students vary considerably in their language skills, prior academic experience, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Our research uses data on public schools in New York City and Ohio in order to identify such methods, and will highlight the advantages and disadvantages of these alternative methods. Preliminary results are expected by June 2002.

Related papers include:

Leanna Stiefel, Amy Ellen Schwartz, Carole Portas and Dae Yeop Kim, "School Budgeting and School Performance: The Impact of New York City's Performance Driven Budgeting Initiative," working paper, Taub Urban Research Center, Fall 2001.

Leanna Stiefel, Amy Ellen Schwartz and Ross Rubenstein, "Using Adjusted Performance Measures for Evaluating Resource Use," Public Budgeting and Finance, Volume 19, No. 3, Fall 1999. Recipient of Joseph S. Wholey Distinguished Scholarship Award.

Ross Rubenstein , Amy Ellen Schwartz and Leanna Stiefel, "Conceptual and Empirical Issues in the Measurement of School Efficiency," National Tax Journal, Proceedings from 91st Annual Conference, 1999.

Amy Ellen Schwartz and Leanna Stiefel, "Measuring School Efficiency: Lessons from Economics, Implications for Practice," in David H. Monk and Herbert J. Walberg, eds., Improving Educational Productivity, Information Age Publishing Inc., forthcoming.

Leanna Stiefel, Amy Ellen Schwartz and Ross Rubenstein "Measuring School Efficiency Using School-Level Data: Theory and Practice," in Margaret Goertz and Allan Odden, eds., School-Based Financing, Corwin Press, 1999.

Amy Ellen Schwartz, "School Districts and Spending in the Schools," Selected Papers in School Finance, 1997-99, 1999.

Ross Rubenstein, Amy Ellen Schwartz and Leanna Stiefel, "Better than Raw: A Guide to Measuring Organizational Performance with Adjusted Performance Measures," under review, April 2001.

Leanna Stiefel, Amy Ellen Schwartz, Patrice Iatarola and Norm Fruchter, "Academic Performance, Characteristics and Expenditures in New York City Elementary and Middle Schools," Condition Report, Education Finance Research Consortium, New York State Education Department, April 2000.

Amy Ellen Schwartz, Leanna Stiefel, and Dae Yeop Kim, "The Impact of School Reform on Student Performance: Evidence From the New York Network for School Renewal Project," working paper, Wagner School, Fall 2001.