Ralph's Pretty-Good Grocery versus Ralph's Super Market: separating excellent agencies from the good ones

What makes a public agency perform at a high level? Some agencies are doing extremely well in their environment and it may be because they are lucky e nough to have access to plentiful resources, excellent management, and a su pportive public. Unfortunately cases such as these provide little prescript ive evidence for public managers looking to improve their own agency's perf ormance. We apply a new quantitative technique (SWAT) to educational outcom e data for 534 school districts in Texas and identify chose districts doing extremely well given their fixed and often limited inputs. This approach i s useful because the truly superior agencies are those that do more with le ss, and public managers who lead their organizations to high performance le vels despite limited resources provide potential solutions to others.