Data Systems Linking Resources to Actions and Outcomes: One of the Nation's Most Pressing Education Challenges

Abstract

The inadequacy of present-day public school financial and performance reporting restricts policymakers. With existing spending and activity information now generally available, public officials can determine only overall education resource levels and make allocative decisions only among gross input categories such as relative amounts of labor and materials. If policymakers knew with greater precision for what activities school resources were actually employed and could systematically link resources to results, the consequence might well be greater (a) knowledge regarding schooling and progress toward an “education production function,” (b) distributional equity of educational resources, and (c) opportunity for informed public discussion of education.

Notes

¹These hypothetic scenarios are taken from chapter 7 of James W. Guthrie and Patrick J. Schuermann's (in press) Modern Education Leadership (Boston: Allyn & Bacon).

²However, even if fundamentally part of the same genus, for those who attempt to interpolate finance data across state boundaries, accounting system idiosyncrasies and definitional differences can be maddening.

³Elevated to cabinet status as the Department of Education in 1979 by the Carter administration.

⁴This matter is apparently more complicated than might initially seem. School-based budgeting and decision making might well be a crucial impediment to developing mixed models of education. However, there is some other dynamic at work also. Otherwise, why is there allegedly so little innovation among private schools that, presumably, are not hindered by the need to rely on mechanical allocation formulae? The probable answer is that such schools are evaluated by the satisfaction of their client parents. They are seldom driven by more precise measures of student performance, particularly some kind of “value-added” performance measures. If they were, if they had actually to account for students' gains in achievement, they might find themselves more motivated to experiment with a wider variety of “production” techniques.