“Managing for Results in America’s Great City Schools: A Report of the Performance Measurement and Benchmarking Project”
For the second year, the Council of the Great City Schools has released detailed data on the business performance of the nation’s largest school districts—part of an initiative designed to help urban educators improve noninstructional operations of their districts.
The report features two years of data on transportation, food services, procurement, security, and maintenance from many of the 66 large school districts that are members of the council, a Washington-based organization that created the multiyear project to identify key indicators and best practices to guide districts on how to perform more efficiently.
The report also includes first-time benchmark data on budgeting and finance, human resources, and information technology. It presents city-by-city data so that member districts can see how they stack up against high-performing systems.
This year’s study includes findings that final general-fund expenditures of the average urban district varied only 2.8 percent from their original projections; that the median cost of transporting students in the 2007 fiscal year was $1,120 per child, up from $988 per child in fiscal 2005; and that the average annual cost of telecommunications services was $32.71 per student in fiscal 2007.
