Measuring School District Performance

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Abstract
This article provides a method of measuring performance in the public sector, specifically performance of school districts. The technique is closely related to the family of Farrell type efficiency measures as well as data envelopment analysis (DEA). It also can be viewed as a generalization of earlier work on educational production functions. The approach gauges performance relative to the best practice frontier constructed from enveloping observed data points. It is nonparametric, i.e., no parametric functional form is imposed on the data, and the approach readily admits multiple goals or outputs. By way of illustration we apply this approach to a sample of Missouri school districts for the 1985-1986 school year. In order to reduce the impact of outliers we employ jackknifing techniques.