From Accountability to Decision-Making? Budgeting with Mandated Performance Measures

Abstract

Government agencies in many nations, including local school districts in the United States, are under pressure to shift to an outcome-based approach to accountability. While the implications of such systems are widely debated, the use of performance measures within local school districts for budgetary decision-making has received relatively little attention. This study of school business officials finds that mandated performance measures, specifically standardized test scores, are important factors in budgetary decision-making but less influential than other factors. Variables that help explain the influence of mandated performance measures include district performance, socio-economic status, and the importance of community involvement in decision-making.

Keywords:

• performance measurement
• accountability
• decision-making
• budgeting

Notes

¹Not all Massachusetts school districts have MASBO members, but a few have more than one member. To avoid weighting our findings toward districts with more than one MASBO member, we only included data from one respondent from each district in our analyses. In the relatively few instances where two respondents were from the same district, we included data from the respondent whose job title most represented the senior business official at the district. We also removed the data from two respondents because they were from a charter and a private school. We conducted a representative analysis of the sample with regard to type of school district (municipal or regional), geographic region of the state, enrollment, spending per student, and reliance on state aid. Independent samples t-tests reveal no statistically significant differences between the means of respondents and nonrespondents. Variance in spending per student of respondents, however, is significantly different (p = .044) from nonrespondents.

²Respondents had a variety of titles, including School Business Administrator, Business Manager, Director of Finance, and Assistant Superintendent, among others.