MEASURING A LOCAL GOVERNMENT SERVICE: A STUDY OF SCHOOL DISTRICTS IN NEW YORK STATE.

The article focuses on a recent study of school districts in New York State. It provides information highly useful for relating educational performance to per pupil expenditure and size of administrative unit, while at the same time making possible a reasonable attempt to isolate the important influences of pupil intelligence and socio-economic background. The findings have been somewhat surprising. Size of school district is negatively related to performance, if at all and expenditure is related strongly to performance only in larger school districts. Performance in small school districts, here defined as those in which there are fewer than 2,000 pupils in average daily attendance, was found to be highly unpredictable. Two basic relationships have been explicitly discussed, that of per pupil expenditure to school district performance and that of school district size to school district performance. After reasonable allowance is made for sociological and intelligential differences on the part of the pupil populations, the relationship of performance to per pupil expenditure has been found to be, except in large urban school districts, disappointingly weak. This would imply, among other things, that the utilization of per capita cost figures for an index of public performance is a highly dangerous practice. With respect to the size relationship, no evidence has been found to support the popular idea of economies of scale in school district performance.