accompany their academic reforms.
The Council of the Great City Schools has developed 50 key performance indicators in five critical
areas of operation in the nation’s big-city school districts: transportation, food services,
maintenance and operations, procurement, and safety and security.
After embarking on a first-of-its-kind benchmarking effort to improve operational performance in
big-city schools, the Council today released Managing for Results in America’s Great City
Schools: A Report of the Performance Measurement and Benchmarking Project.
The multi-year studypresents 50 indicators, modeled after those used in other public and private
sectors, to measure urban school performance on a range of operational and business functions.
The study also presents comparable city-by-city data on those indicators that will enable districts
to benchmark themselves against high-performing school systems and identify best practices in
each of the business areas.
While the “business side” of urban education has always placed a strong emphasis on data, says
Council Executive Director Michael Casserly, comparable indicators have never been available in
public education in a way that would allow one school district to peg its performance to another.
“To be accountable, we must be able to measure the effectiveness and efficiency of our
operations,” Casserly stresses. “Good comparative data give school districts the ability to
analyze how well they manage their resources.”
Managing for Results was developed during the Council’s annual meetings of its chief operating
and chief financial officers, who launched the Performance Measurement and Benchmarking
Project in 2003.
The project aims to help the nation’s urban public schools measure their performance, improve
their operational decisions, and strengthen their practices.
Among the initial results of the multi-year study, the findings from the 66 big-city school districts
showed:
· The median cost of transporting students is $988 a child;
· The average student-participation rate in food services is 59.6 percent;
· The average school custodian services 23,501 square feet;
· The average time to complete the procurement process and receive goods is 35 days;
and
· The percent of school buildings with alarm systems is 23.5 percent.
Each of the indicators in the new report includes information about why the measure is important,
how it is defined and calculated, what the range of responses were, and how the indicators are
affected by other school district practices.
The Council expects big-city school boards and superintendents will be able to use these
indicators and the data gathered on them “to assess their own business operations, measure
progress on operational reforms, and demonstrate greater transparency in district operations to
the public,” Casserly emphasizes.
Later in the study, the project will develop indicators and benchmarks in the areas of budget and
finance, human resources, and information technology. Trends will also be tracked, and best
practices in high-performing districts will be documented.
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The Council of the Great City Schools is the only national organization exclusively
representing the needs of urban public schools. It is a coalition of 66 large city public
school districts.
