How Much Do Schools and Districts Matter? A Production Function Approach to School Accountability

Abstract

Phelps, J. L., & Addonizio, M. (2006). How Much Do Schools and Districts Matter? A Production Function Approach to School Accountability. Educational Considerations, 33(2), 51-62. --------How do district policies, leadership, and support services influence the quality of teaching and learning in public schools? This article uses a rich longitudinal school-level database to estimate a model of student achievement and analyzes the residuals in the model to obtain estimates of the contributions of unobserved school and school district characteristics to student performance. The second section of the article reviews recent research on current approaches to determining school quality on the basis of student achievement test scores. Section three presents an alternative approach to assessing school and district effectiveness using an educational production function. A production function model is specified in the fourth section, and empirical results are presented in section five. A summary of findings in presented in the final section, along with implications for state and federal policy and programs regarding school accountability. (Contains 3 figures, 5 tables and 23 endnotes.)