Performance Benchmarking of School Districts in New York State

We used data envelopment analysis to measure the relative performance of New York State school districts in the 2011–2012 academic year and provided detailed alternative improvement pathways for each district. We found that 201 of the 624 (32.2 %) school districts with one or more high schools and 28 of the 31 (90.3 %) school districts with no high school were on the performance frontier. Using a mixed orientation, we found evidence that FTE teachers could be reduced by 8.4 %, FTE teacher support personnel could be reduced by 17.2 %, and FTE building administration and professional staff personnel could be reduced by 9.4 %. In addition, we found that the percentage of students who score 3 or 4 on the English exam could increase by 4.9 % points, 5.0 % points on the mathematics exam, and 5.8 % points on the science exam and the average graduation rate could increase by 5.4 % points.

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