Efficiency and Performance in Texas Public Schools

Do high ratings based upon traditional performance measures go hand in hand with efficiency? This paper addresses this question using stochastic production frontier methods. We utilize a six-year panel of test score, school input, and school student characteristics data for a sample of 3,000 campuses in Texas. We generate estimates of school-specific efficiency based upon the estimates of the one-sided school specific error term in a stochastic production frontier model. School rankings on the basis of estimated efficiency are not well correlated with school rankings on the basis of traditional measures of school performance.