What Influence School District Effectiveness Growth Trajectories? A Growth Mixture Modeling Analysis

Abstract

As a local education agency, school districts play an important role in the local control and making educational decisions. Previous quantitative studies on school districts using longitudinal dataset have assumed that all school district effectiveness (SDE) changes in a common pattern, while ignoring the probability that there might exist distinct subgroups of SDE trajectories. Thus, the purpose of the present study was to examine the existence of multiple SDE changing patterns and how school district demographic variables and financial expenditures affect classification of SDE groups using a growth mixture model (GMM) with a national longitudinal dataset including all public school districts in the United States from 2009 to 2015 (n = 11,185). The results indicated that (a) there exists three different classes of school district effectiveness growth trajectories, which can be named as a constant SDE group (3.66%), a decreasing SDE group (34.16%), and an increasing SDE group (62.18%); (b) school district demographic characteristics such as a percentage of free lunch students and general administration expenditure per pupil are significantly associated with the probability of group classifications; and (c) the longitudinal effects of school district demographic covariates and financial expenditures within each class such as school district locations (e.g., urban, suburban, etc.) are associated with the growth factors (intercept and slopes) in different ways.