Ranking High Schools and Courts on Their Performance
The 2009 U .S. News & World Report second annual rankings of America’s best public high schools came out this week. The rankings were done by School Evaluation Services, a K – 12 education data research firm run by Standard & Poor’s, based on an analysis of the performances of 21,069 public high schools in the 2006 -2007 school year (see www.usnews.com/highschools ). The annual rankings of high schools hold two important lessons for judges and court managers, especially those who bristle at the idea of comparative performance measurement. (See “Ten Reasons Not to Measure Court Performance,” Made2Measure , November 19, 2008) The first lesson is that performance matters to citizens. The U.S. News & World Report rankings are based on the key principle that a great high school must be able to produce measurable academic outcomes to show that it successfully educates all of its students across a range – a balanced scorecard – of performance indicators. Little else matte...