Indicator: Institutions’ contributions to student outcomes

Why it matters

School effectiveness measures aim to capture schools’ impacts on student achievement on test scores, as well as more long-term outcomes, such as high school graduation, college access and success, and eventual earnings. Relative to status measures such as college enrollment or completion rates, which conflate who institutions serve with how well they serve them, approaches to measuring institutions’ contributions to student outcomes consider students’ initial performance levels (for example, using prior test scores) or other background characteristics. These analyses can paint a different picture of institutional effectiveness than status measures. For instance, analyses of nationwide data by the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University showed that, although test scores are higher, on average, in more affluent school districts, the relationship between school affluence and student outcomes does not hold when examining student learning growth. Measures of institutional effectiveness can thus help E-W systems identify the institutions that exceed (or fail to meet) expected outcomes for students given their prior performance.
 

Evidence of disparate access to effective schools is mixed across studies, which are based on different measures, outcomes, and settings. For example, one large-scale study of schools’ contributions to students’ performance on the ACT found that schools with greater shares of students from low-income households or Black, Indigenous, or Latino students tended to have lower value-added scores.  On the other hand, a study that measured Louisiana high schools’ contributions to students’ high school graduation, college enrollment and persistence, and earnings found little or no relationship between schools’ contributions to these outcomes and the share of students from low-income households in the school. At the postsecondary level, researchers who have measured colleges’ contributions to student outcomes have found variation across institutions, but they have not examined how they relate to students’ demographic characteristics. However, although college selectivity has little or no relationship to value-added, inputs such as instructional expenditures per student and faculty-to-student ratio are significantly positively related to colleges’ value-added.