Performing In The Top 5% Of Texas School Districts

Public education is complex whether you are talking about schools in Oklahoma, California, New York, or here in Texas.  Consequently, it is critical for public school leaders to find a performance management system that will help move their school district forward academically as well as identify models of high performance and efficiency.

For the last year, the Carrollton-Farmers Branch School District has been working with an organization that focuses on public education performance management.  The Education Resource Group (ERG) performance matrix was developed to identify school districts that provide high academic performance in the most financially efficient manner.

In C-FB ISD, we use multiple measures to evaluate how the district is doing in terms of student performance.  For example, the staff reviews the state's Academic Excellence Indicator System (AEIS), the federal Annual Yearly Progress (AYP)  reports, SAT and ACT data, and other student assessment measures.  We always want to provide an instructional program that will keep all students achieving at high levels.

We believe that the ERG performance management system provides key data for C-FB ISD.  By analyzing the student performance and financial data from the 200 largest school districts in Texas, ERG can determine the annual educational productivity of individual school districts in three areas: overall educational value, academic performance and financial performance.

You may wonder why it is important to look at the 200 largest Texas school districts when there are more than 1,000 school districts in our state.  Since about 81% of students in Texas attend these 200 school districts, we believe analyzing their academic and financial performance will tell us where the "bright spots" in education are.

The other "good news" about the ERG performance system is that unlike the state's accountability rating system it ranks performance. For example, the ERG performance matrix integrates academic and financial measures into a relatively clear framework of performance management.  This performance matrix can identify school districts that provide strong academic performance while spending the lowest amount per student.

In the chart above, the districts in the "green" box (1-1) are achieving at high academic levels while spending tax dollars wisely compared to the districts in the "red" box.  The good news for the Carrollton-Farmers Branch ISD community is your district is one of eight in the "1-1" box.  The districts in the "1-1" box are among the top 5% of the Texas school districts providing a high return on investment to their stakeholders. 

For 2010: C-FB ISD ranked 11 out of the 200 Texas largest school districts in overall educational value. For 2010, the district ranked 17 out of 200 in academic performance and 49 out of 200 in financial performance.

The ERG performance management system is instrumental to our work.  In the district's Strategic Improvement Plan, we have outlined strategies under each of our four objectives to move our rankings forward until C-FB ISD is at the top.  In Carrollton-Farmers Branch, we have one goal: "high achievement for all students."  By working toward this one goal, we will continue to improve our performance.