ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is to analyse the main conceptual and practical problems of outcome measurement in education. The particular emphasis will be on assessing the comparative effectiveness of schools, an issue that has received considerable attention in Britain now that schools are required to publish their examination results. Since 1991, such results have been presented by the government in the form of ‘league tables’. One of the central goals of such government initiatives has been to evaluate the performance of schools with a view to enhancing choice, control and accountability in the British educational system (UK Government, 1992). However, as we shall show, the proper assessment of school effectiveness can be extremely complex. Crude rankings based on single indicators of school outcomes can be extremely misleading, leading to faulty inferences about performance, and seriously dysfunctional consequences. Therefore, in contrast with most of the chapters in the book, the emphasis here will be on interpreting outcome measures, rather than on the measurement process itself.
