Toward Effective and Efficient School Districts: Facility Finance, Resource Management and Data Driven Decision Making Alex J. Bowers Ph.D. Associate Professor of Education Leadership, Teachers College, Columbia University http://www.tc.columbia.edu/academics/?facid=ab3764 Abstract: District Effectiveness Research (DER) has recently emerged as a research domain that examines the practices, leadership roles and organizational structures of school districts that find success with the majority of their students. However, little work has been done to date that examines how district and school leaders can leverage the vast amounts of data currently collected in schools to help inform decisions on how to allocate limited district resources to specific student, school and district needs. In this research presentation, Alex Bowers discusses how school practitioners, researchers and policymakers can bring together these large and comprehensive datasets with recent innovations in data patterning, longitudinal growth models, and mixture model analysis to inform district practices around three main research topics: school facilities finance, district resource management, and data driven decision making for students at-risk of dropping out. Specifically, the presentation will focus on addressing which factors are most associated with school districts passing or failing capital facility finance bond elections; how to identify effective and financially efficient school districts from entire state-wide longitudinal datasets for in-depth qualitative case studies; and early and accurate identification of students at-risk of dropping out of school through the use of teacher assigned grades. In these ways, the presentation will provide a discussion of the integration of large district and state-level data systems, application of recent innovations in data analysis, and a focus on identifying effective school resource and data management practices.