Measuring client satisfaction with public education II: comparing schools with state benchmarks

Because the results of the client satisfaction evaluation trials conducted in the state's public schools revealed that levels of client satisfaction differed in significant and meaningful ways between parents and students as well as between types of schools, this research consultancy provided school versus benchmark comparison reports based on groups of generally comparable school types. The state benchmark for each set of comparable schools estimated how easy it was, on average, for the members of the benchmark group (parents or students) to endorse each of the 20 School Opinion Survey Likert-scale items (King and Bond, 2003). The school satisfaction level for each item was calculated by a similar process to estimate how easy it was, on average, for the members of the school sample (parents or students) to endorse that item. Reports to individual schools used easy to interpret Parent/Student Satisfaction Graphs which plotted the Rasch-modeled differences between the state benchmark level and the school level for each item. In very small schools where the small amount of data did not allow for item-by-item graphs to be constructed, overall satisfaction graphs provided one global comparison with the appropriate benchmark to be reported.