School Effectiveness Modeling

School effectiveness modeling estimates how much, and in what ways, individual schools contribute to student outcomes once differences in what students bring with them are taken into account. Using multilevel (hierarchical) models, it adjusts for student intake — prior attainment, socioeconomic background — and isolates the residual variation attributable to schools. The field asks not just whether schools differ, but which factors make some schools more effective and for whom, distinguishing genuine school contributions from the composition of their intake.