Student achievement and efficiency in Missouri schools and the No Child Left Behind Act

The 2001 No Child Left Behind Act requires that schools make “annual yearly progress” in raising student achievement, or face possible sanctions. The No Child Left Behind Act places added emphasis on test scores, such as scores from the Missouri Assessment Program (MAP), to evaluate the performance of schools.In this paper, we investigate school performance in Missouri by measuring the efficiency with which schools provide their education services using a two-stage data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach. We simulate the effects of two sanctions (school transfer, and supplemental tutoring services) under the No Child Left Behind Act on the performance of failing schools.We find that the two sanctions differ in their impact on the failing school districts’ managerial efficiency. If student performance improves as a result of the sanctions, the transfer of students sanction is more likely to improve managerial efficiency than is the tutoring services sanction.