How does schoolbenchmarking.com identify benchmark schools?

Benchmarking is a management discipline used to support continuous improvement in organizations. It involves comparing your performance and strategies to those of best-in-class or benchmark performers in order to help set improvement targets and identify improvement strategies.

schoolbenchmarking.com helps schools compare themselves against best-in-class performers.

Our benchmarking analyses are based on data envelopment analysis, also known as frontier analysis. We use Frontier Analyst®, a performance management application. It measures how well a school performs across a variety of performance indicators versus the levels of resources it consumes and/or the challenges it faces.

Schools that lead the way in their ability to produce results given the resources they consume and the challenges they face are identified as benchmark schools. For each school not identified as a benchmark school, the model provides a custom subset of these benchmark schools.

Performance indicators might include the percent of students passing a mathematics exam or the percent of students graduating. Resources might include expenditures per pupil. Challenges might include the percent of students receiving free lunch or the percent of students who are English language learners. We customize the benchmarking study design for each of our clients.

The full value of benchmarking as a school improvement tool is realized in the school-to-school discussions that result from the pairings on schoolbenchmarking.com.

Frontier Analyst

In Frontier Analyst®, efficiency is defined as follows:

Efficiency equation

Assume for the purposes of illustration that we are studying the efficiency of a set of schools by measuring one input, the schools' Student Wealth Index (SWI), a measure of prosperity, and two outputs, exam results for English Language Arts (ELA) and mathematics achievement. Two performance ratios result: ELA/SWI and math/SWI. The efficiency of the schools can be shown as a scatter diagram.

Frontier plot

The efficiency frontier "envelops" the other schools and clearly shows the relative performance of each school. Any school on the frontier is considered a benchmark. The analysis weights each school's inputs and outputs in order to show it in its best possible light.

In this example, there are five benchmark schools. The efficiency frontier represents a standard of best achieved performance. This does not imply that the schools on the frontier cannot improve their performance.

Each school receives a personalized set of benchmark schools. These are the high performing, "frontier" schools that have the similar input-output profiles to the lower performing school. In the example above, the school represented by the triangle has two benchmark schools.

The simple example presented above has one input and two outputs. The frontier analysis results reported on schoolbenchmarking.com are based on multiple inputs and outputs.

Frontier Analyst is a registered trademark of Banxia Holdings Limited.

More information

Go to schoolbenchmarking.com