Best Schools, Worst Schools and Efficiency : A Reconciliation and Assessment of Alternative Classification Systems

While academic researchers and policymakers debate the relative merits of ranking public schools and the alternative methodologies for doing so, classifications of public schools have become a feature of the educational landscape. In many cases, the goal is to distinguish the "best" schools or the "worst" schools from the others - for rewards or sanctions, for intervention, or as a guide for parents or students. In New York city, for example, a local non-for-profit education advocacy organization, Advocates for Children of New York, Inc. (AFC), has published two guides to the best public schools (Hemphill 1999, 2000). At the same time, the New York City school district recently identified a set of schools performing so well that they were exempted from a systemwide curriculum and governance reform. At the other end of the spectrum, both New York State and the federal government have identified a set of schools performing so poorly as to require special interventions to spur improvement