Measuring Equity: Creating a New Standard for Inputs and Outputs

Measuring the Alignment between States’ Finance and Accountability Policies: The Opportunity Gap

“…They indicated that the use of equity statistics were appropriate for researchers to determine states' progress in meeting equality of educational opportunity goals; however, an acceptable standard of equity needed to be established for student performance outcomes. Knoeppel and Della Sala (2013) reasoned that the linkage between the equity of funding inputs and student performance outcomes was a key aspect of adequacy-based school finance litigation and policy and merited an examination of the appropriateness of standards of equity. Their investigation of the equity of finance systems and student performance outcomes relied on the 0.10 standard for the coefficient of variance as suggested in the literature.…”

“…Rather, the authors noted that a standard coefficient of variance of 0.05 would result in 68% of district revenues within 5% of the mean and 95% of revenues within 10% of the mean. Similarly, Knoeppel and Della Sala (2013) reasoned that a .03 standard for student performance outcomes would result in 68% of districts' scores within 3% of the mean and 95% of the districts within 6% of the mean. Furthermore, this standard would permit sufficient variability that allows for students to score above proficiency while ensuring that the mean of the distribution is near states' proficiency targets.…”

“…Furthermore, this standard would permit sufficient variability that allows for students to score above proficiency while ensuring that the mean of the distribution is near states' proficiency targets. Knoeppel and Della Sala (2013) also made use of other measures of dispersion and distribution to examine states' progress toward achieving equity-related student achievement policy goals. In doing so, they described an ideal distribution of student performance (see Figure 1) that mirrors policy goals and judicial interpretations, where "most districts…cluster around proficiency and other districts that scored higher…tail off from the distribution" (p. 49).…”

“…In addition to the 0.03 standard for the coefficient of variance, the McLoone Index was suggested to be at 0.98 and the distribution should be positively skewed and leptokurtic. Next, Knoeppel and Della Sala (2013) introduced an equity ratio to represent a measure of policy alignment that was suitable for all states. In particular, the ratio combined the equity of finance inputs and student performance outcomes to discern the degree to which finance inputs have been aligned with accountability policy outcomes.…”

“…The research described in this paper expands on previous attempts to conceptualize, measure, and evaluate the degree to which states have aligned their finance systems with their specific accountability policies (Knoeppel & Della Sala, 2013;Knoeppel, First, Della Sala, & Ordu, 2014). Previous research has centered on the calculation and testing of an equity ratio to discern states' progress toward providing an educational system that yields equitable student performance outcomes given equitable resource inputs.…”