A Hierarchical Model for Studying School Effects

Abstract

When researchers investigate how school policies, practices, or climates affect student outcomes, they use multilevel, hierarchical data. Though methodologists have consistently warned of the formidable inferential problems such data pose for traditional statistical methods, no comprehensive alternative analytic strategy has been available. This paper presents a general statistical methodology for such hierarchically structured data and illustrates its use by reexamining the High School and Beyond data and the controversy over the effectiveness of public and Catholic schools. The model enables the researcher to utilize mean achievement and certain structural parameters that characterize the equity in the social distribution of achievement as multivariate outcomes for each school. Variation in these school-level outcomes is then explained as a function of school characteristics.