The Intersection between School Efficiency and Student Individual Differences

School funding literature centers largely around how spending impacts student performance, but rarely examines how efficiently that spending takes place. This paper used Data Envelopment Analysis, to examine how efficiently Florida elementary schools spent funds to produce student gains in reading, finding that schools (n=1,446) performed on average at a 61% relative efficiency level for the 2009-2010 school year. Next, this paper examined the predictability of these efficiency scores, finding several demographic variables to be significant predictors of school-level efficiency. Finally, this paper used data from n=677,386 Florida public elementary students to measure the relation between these efficiency scores and student individual differences, finding the negative impact of students having an exceptionality to be larger in lower efficiency schools.