Technical Questions & Current Specifications: Using Predicted District Effectiveness Rates as a Performance Benchmark

The purpose of this paper is to open the methods, construction and assumptions of a new performance benchmark to examination, critique, and improvement by technical experts. The paper begins with known technical questions about this new benchmark. In includes suggestions made by technical advisors. It then details the construction of the benchmark's measures, and reports the relevant statistics. Kansas State Department of Education (KSDE's) new performance measure, the effectiveness rate, measures school districts' effectiveness in enrolling their students in postsecondary education for two continuous years after graduation, or in getting students certified in an industry-recognized skill. Its companion benchmark, the predicted effectiveness rate and the focus of this paper, uses linear regression to describe districts' mean effectiveness rates after adjusting for risk factors largely beyond the districts' control. By comparing districts' actual effectiveness rates to their predicted rates, while accounting for student and environmental risk factors like cumulative poverty, the model assumes that the residuals contain some comparable measure of district performance.