A Consideration of the Decision to Reallocate Educational Resources on the Basis of a Comparison of Academic Area Test Scores across Schools
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Abstract
Although suggestions for the reallocation of educational resources for individual schools or school districts are often made on the basis of comparative test scores by academic area across such individual schools or school districts, such scores, it is shown, are neither necessarily nor sufficiently informative for the systematic determination of utility increasing reallocations of those resources. To the extent that different administrators hold different educational utility functions in terms of test scores, then, even under assumptions of concurrent, but individual utility maximizations, different distributions of educational resources would be expected. Students in individual school or school districts, therefore, would be expected to have comparative test scores that are necessarily low in at least one academic area and high in at least one other, mutatis mutandis. Reallocations made on the basis of comparative test scores by academic area within individual schools or school districts, therefore, cannot, it is shown, be expected to systematically increase educational utility.
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