Educators often feel ambivalent about the pursuit of efficiency in education. On the one hand, there is a basic belief that efficiency is a good and worthy goal; on the other hand, there is sense of worry that efforts to improve efficiency will ultimately undermine what lies at the heart of high-quality education. Part of the difficulty stems from a misunderstanding about the meaning of efficiency as well as from the legacy of past, sometimes misguided, efforts to improve the efficiency of educational systems. It is therefore useful to begin with a basic discussion of the efficiency concept.
The notion of efficiency applies to a remarkably large number of fields, including education. It is a disarmingly simple idea that presupposes a transformation of some kind. One can think in terms of what was in hand before the transformation, what was in hand after the transformation, and one can also think about the transformation process itself. The before elements are commonly referred to as ingredients, inputs, or resources while the after elements are called results, outputs, or outcomes. The transformation process is sometimes less obvious and can become confused with ingredients. For example, in an educational setting, a teacher can be thought of as an ingredient while teaching is an important part of the actual transformation process.
The concept of efficiency is often connected to a moral imperative to obtain more desired results from fewer resources. Efficiency needs to be thought of as a matter of degree. Efficiency is not a “yes/no” kind of phenomenon. It is instead better thought of in relative or comparative terms. One operation may be more efficient than another. This said, the more efficient of the two operations could become even more efficient. The quest for greater efficiency is never over, and this sense of a perennially unfinished agenda is one source of the generalized sense of anxiety that tends to surround the efficiency concept.
The Choice of Outcomes
If the goal is to obtain more desired results from fewer resources, then it is important to be clear about what is being sought. Society might have a very efficient system because a large amount of outcome is being obtained relative to the resources being spent or invested, but if the outcomes are out of sync with what is truly desired, there is a real sense in which the system is not very efficient. Of course, this invites important questions about who gets to decide what counts as a desirable outcome, and in education there are longstanding and ongoing debates over what the educational system ought to be accomplishing.
In the United States, education is viewed as a responsibility of the individual states rather than the national government, and the states have made efforts to define the outcomes they seek from their educational systems. These efforts have come to be known as standards-driven initiatives, where the standards constitute pronouncements from the states about the collective expectations for what the schools need to accomplish. The idea has been for each state to articulate the desired outcomes and then provide flexibility to the districts, schools, administrators, teachers, and students to meet the standards in ways that make the most sense given local circumstances.
States have handled this in different ways and there are interesting deeper questions about how to balance state judgments with judgments that are made at more localized levels. How, for example, should a disagreement between a duly constituted local school board and the state be settled? Going further, how should the views of local boards be considered as the state sets its standards? What is the proper role for minority views? And how should revisions be handled as time passes?
It is customary to think of the state’s setting minimum standards that can be exceeded by individual localities if a locality resolves to do so and can muster the necessary resources. This thinking presupposes a hierarchical view of educational outcomes in the sense that outcome “C” builds upon outcome “B” while outcome “B” builds upon outcome “A.” A problem is that outcomes may not always have this kind of hierarchical nature. Suppose a school wants to provide a high degree of personalized attention as part of its program. Is this an input or an outcome? Let us suppose that this is a costly thing to do. The school that pursues this strategy is going to consume more ingredients and if only the standard outcomes are looked at, this school is going to look like costs are high relative to the outcomes that are realized. Hence, the school could look inefficient for the simple reason that it has chosen to pursue a different set of educational goals. There is also the possibility that a locally selected goal can interfere with or undermine one of the state selected goals.
In addition to reaching agreement about the mix of outcomes to pursue, there are important measurement issues to consider. An interest in efficiency is frequently accompanied by an interest in measuring magnitudes. If one is seeking more out of less, one frequently wants to know “how much more,” and the result has been a boom in the efforts by educational psychologists and others to develop valid and reliable measures of the learning gains of students. Critics of efficiency analysis in education worry that ease of measurement can unduly influence the selection of the outcomes that the system will be structured to achieve. In other words, the worry is that the drive for efficiency will lead, perhaps inadvertently, toward the use of educational outcomes that are chosen more because they are easy to measure than because of their intrinsic long-term value for either individual students or the larger society.

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