# **A. Introduction**

Increasingly strident calls for results and accountability from public spending are an accepted fact. At the same time, it is acknowledged that many results related to public policy interventions require a long time. Public policy often seeks to bring about ambitious and fundamental behavioral change from diverse groups of large numbers of people. Examples include efforts to streamline government, to reduce corruption, to enhance an economy’s innovative capacity, and to enable people to be healthier. Long and uncertain implementation periods typify complex endeavors such as educational reform, which involve students, teachers, parents, school administrators, local, regional and national government officials who interact in multiple ways. While waiting for potential _results_ far away in the future, public policy practitioners and researchers try to measure reform implementation _processes_ and organizational _structures_ that are eventually believed to lead to the desired social outcomes. Since it is quite difficult, if not impossible, to define absolute measures of abstractly constructed performance measures, the default is to use relative measures – where the performance of units is compared to one another, _benchmarked_ to some actual or conceptual ideal.

Most measures are presented in the form of a multi-dimensioned index. Typically, the dimensions are broken down into sub-dimensions and variables that are constructed by experts in the field. Generally, the choice of dimensions and variables as well as the choice of weights is arbitrary – very rarely can one find any rigorously constructed theory of measurement or empirical evidence that explains why the elements of the index are what they are.<sup>1</sup> Sometimes there is an implicit weight of one for factors or dimensions and sometimes there are arbitrarily imposed explicit weights. The construction of these indices raise a series of questions - the most basic one of which concerns _construct validity_ – does the index indeed measure what it purports to measure? Then there is the question of _inter-temporal_ and _inter-personal invariance_ or _reliability_ – meaning would one be measuring the same thing when one conducts the measurement after some time or if some other person or group of persons conducts the measurement? A method general enough to cover different kinds of performance measurement, but simple enough to understand and compute would be really useful.

This paper examines the issue of benchmarking for the case of a popular and extensively studied policy reform known as School Based Management (SBM). SBM is a widely researched policy mechanism that can bring the benefits of decentralization to public service delivery in schools. It is widely acknowledged that SBM measures take a long time before they can have an economically significant impact on outcomes such as improved student learning. A corollary is that the level of implementation of SBM can serve as an intermediate outcome that can be used to determine the extent

> 1 Well-known examples of expert opinion based benchmarking indices are the “Human Development Index” produced by UNDP and the “Doing Business” index produced by the World Bank. The World Bank’s “Systems Approach for Better Education Results” or SABER initiative extends the index construction method to benchmark education policy across countries. SABER covers a range of topics for policy benchmarking – from early childhood education to workforce development.

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