Improving Resource Allocation Within School Districts: A Goal-Programming Approach
Elchanan Cohn, John M. Morgan · Journal of education finance · 1978
a market economy, entrepreneurs are under pressure to reduce costs. If the market is characterized either by perfect competition or by monopolistic competition, cost minimization is required for survival of the firm in the long run. In markets where barriers to entry of new firms exist, sellers are still under pressure to behave as cost minimizers in order that they can reap the maximum profit from the enterprise. In public education, however, such incentives are lacking, and therefore it is likely that resources are not allocated in an optimal manner. As long as the economy was growing at a relatively rapid pace, along with growing K-12 enrollments, funds for the operation of public schools were relatively plentiful. In an age of plenty, coupled with growth, administrators are frequently more interested in expansion and development than in reallocation of resources to reduce costs. That era is no longer here, replaced by stagnation- even reduction-in enrollments, along with increased competition from higher education and other public services for the taxpayers' dollar. It seems that now should be an especially opportune time to concentrate on the allocation-of-resources topic, since it appears that improved resource allocation may be the only option which administrators may employ to improve the educational outputs. The purpose of this paper is to provide a framework which may assist school administrators in such an effort. The principal technique employed in this study is known as goal programming. It is a variant of linear programming, a tool widely used by economists and operations researchers in developing and implementing models of resource allocation. There are several examples of the use of linear programming in the educational con