Describing school effects with residual terms - Modeling the interaction between school practice and student background

This study attempts to make more accessible an approach that can be used to rank the performance of individual schools using residual terms from a hie rarchical linear model. Specifically, the study describes procedures that c an be used to summarize the effect of schools when interactions between sch ool practice and student background exist and applies them to a fairly real istic school effects data set. This article also serves as a reminder of th e importance of considering differential school effectiveness by illustrati ng problems that can occur when the school effect is summarized by a single quantitative indicator.