ALTERING THE BIAS IN DIFFERENTIAL SCHOOL EFFECTIVENESS USING DATA ENVELOPMENT ANALYSIS

There is evidence that many schools are differentially effective in th at they promote with different effectiveness the academic attainments of different groups of pupils, divided by such characteristics as prio r academic attainments, socio-economic background and so on. Awareness of the extent and direction of a school's differential effectiveness is important. Measures of overall performance of a differentially effe ctive school can be misleading and targets seeking to improve the over all performance of such a school may not address its underlying inadeq uacies in raising the attainments of specific groups of pupils. This p aper develops a data envelopment analysis based method for setting tar gets for differentially effective schools to enable them to alter the bias of their differential effectiveness. The method also identifies r ole model schools which a differentially effective school can emulate in seeking to redress the imbalances in its effectiveness.