Methods for Measuring School Effectiveness

Many personal and policy decisions turn on perceptions of school effectiveness, defined here as the causal effect of attendance at a particular school or set of schools on student test scores and other outcomes. Widely-disseminated school ratings frameworks compare average student achievement across schools, but uncontrolled differences in means may owe more to selection bias than to causal effects. Such selection problems have motivated a wave of econometric innovation that uses elements of random and quasi-experimental variation to measure school effectiveness. This chapter reviews these empirical strategies, highlighting solved problems and open questions. Empirical examples are used throughout.