School organizational decisions on resources and priorities shape the provision and distribution of learning opportunities, potentially creating conflicts between efficiency and equity. We evaluated this organizational efficiency-equity tradeoff hypothesis with statewide administrative data on elementary school students from one western state. We used value-added models of student achievement to generate annual estimates of schools’ (a) overall effectiveness in promoting learning and (b) differential effectiveness in promoting more learning for low-income students relative to higher-income peers, and we explored the relationship between them. We found meaningful variability in differential effectiveness and a clear negative association between overall and differential effectiveness, but one that is sensitive to context. This implies that efficiency-equity tradeoffs are a common but not inevitable feature of school practice as educators balance diverse organizational goals.
Yoo et al. (Tue,) studied this question.