ارزیابی عملکرد در دبیرستان های دولتی شیکاگو در پی تمرکززدایی

This research analyses the changes in performance for Chicago high schools between 1989 and 1994 following the introduction of site-based management in 1988. The purpose of this paper is to assess whether this decentralization improved performance or not. We modeled the change from centralized to decentralized control following Grosskopf, Hayes, Taylor & Weber, 1999 (Anticipating the consequences of school reform: a new use of DEA, Management Science), and used cost indirect output distance functions to model decentralized control. Malmquist productivity index results show very little improvement in productivity with sample achieved improvements off-setting realized declines. Second stage regression results, though, provide some evidence of small improvements in efficiency over this time period. Thus, the overall results are mixed.

In the November 7, 1987 issue of the Chicago Sun Times, William Bennett, then Secretary of Education, declared the Chicago public school system to be the “worst in America”. According to Hess (1991), about one half of Chicago's high schools scored in the lowest one percent on the ACT of all US high schools, and sixty to seventy percent of elementary students were below national norms on reading tests. Perhaps in response, the Illinois legislature passed the Chicago School Reform Act of 1988, which dramatically changed the organization of Chicago public schools. Before this reform, all of the almost 600 schools in Chicago were in one school district governed centrally by the Chicago Board of Education. The 1988 reform introduced site-based management, which returned decision-making control to the individual schools. Each school acquired its own elected local school council, which could make decisions concerning principal evaluation and selection, budgeting and planning. In 1996 this experiment in school reform ended when Governor Jim Edgar and the Illinois legislature granted Mayor Richard Daley centralized power over the Chicago Public Schools (CPS). This created a five-member board and a CEO for the school system. Daley appointed Paul Vallas (his budget director) as CEO and Gerry Chico (his former chief of staff) as President of the Board of Trustees. As a result, the Chicago public school system is now run like a corporate business. Attention is paid to outcomes such as test scores, dropout rates and attendance rates. A new core curriculum has been established, students who do not pass assessment must attend summer school, etc. Although the local school councils are nominally in place, in effect the Chicago public schools have been returned to a high degree of central control. The purpose of this paper is to assess whether the earlier experiment in site-based management really failed to improve performance in Chicago's high schools.1 We employ a stylized model of schools under site-based management as the building blocks for our performance measures. One of the features of site-based management is the devolution of control over the budget to the individual schools and their elected councils. The budget is given in total, but the local council is given discretion over how to spend it. To capture this basic element of site-based management we use a cost indirect output distance function to model individual schools. This is essentially a multiple output production function with a budget constraint. The idea is that the local council's goal is to maximize school outcomes, given the technological possibilities, and given their budget. How to allocate the budget across inputs is a choice variable in this problem. We use these building blocks to compute productivity changes over the 1989–94 time period. This index, the Malmquist productivity index, does not require output prices to aggregate outputs and does not presume efficiency or profit-maximizing behavior. The Malmquist productivity index also provides information on the sources of productivity change, which include changes in efficiency and changes in the frontier (innovation). This will prove useful, for instance, in determining if the decentralized system under reform became more (less) efficient as a result of the change, or whether these changes actually shifted the frontier. We analyze the changes in performance of Chicago high schools between 1989 and 1994 using data obtained from both the Illinois State Board of Education and the Chicago Panel on Public School Policy and Finance. We find that performance in Chicago public high schools was mixed over the 1989–94 reform period. Roughly half of the schools improved (slightly), while roughly half showed declines in productivity over this time period. Higher spending per pupil was associated with lower productivity in our sample.

The purpose of this paper was to model and assess the effect of introducing site-based management to Chicago public high schools. We model the change from centralized to decentralized control following Grosskopf et al. (1999). This approach uses cost indirect output distance functions to model decentralized control. To test for improvements over time and to determine whether these responses were brought about due to innovation or improvements in resource utilization, we compute Malmquist productivity indexes and develop these into measures of innovation (technical change or shifts in the frontier) and efficiency change. On average there was very little improvement over the 1989–94 time period. Inspection of the disaggregated results suggests that this is due to the distribution of the indexes—roughly half of the sample achieved improvements which were offset by the half that realized declines. A second stage regression provides some statistical evidence that there may have been a small improvement in efficiency over the 1989–94 time period. These results also suggest that schools whose per pupil expenditures were increasing over this time period had relatively lower productivity. We conjecture that these schools may have been receiving relatively more Title 1 money and have more disadvantaged students, which is broadly consistent with the findings by Downes & Horowitz (1994). We conclude that our evidence suggests that Chicago's school reform experiment in site-based management resulted in mixed results in terms of performance over the 1989–94 time period. Our results only include data on schools in the post-reform period; thus, there might have been improvements that we have not captured. Also, we are looking at the performance of Chicago public high schools relative to themselves. If it were available, it would be extremely useful to include information on private schools and other public high schools in the state. This would allow us to compare the relative effectiveness of site-based management and magnet schools, for example. Of course, our results lead to the obvious question—will the Daley led return to centralized control yield better performance in Chicago's schools than site-based management achieved? Anecdotal evidence suggests that performance is improving. We would propose complementing this evidence with something like the productivity indexes employed here.