Effectiveness

Goals and Results

The goals of an organization and the results of the organization can be compared to determine the extent of the organization's effectiveness. In an elementary school, a traditional goal is that students have to know how to read by the time they leave the school. Whether or not this goal is achieved is measured by testing reading capabilities of students when they are about to graduate. The effectiveness of the school is then the extent to which students in fact read when they graduate.

Effectiveness in this sense can be assessed at varying levels of aggregation. One level is the individual school. A higher level is an individual school district or municipality. A level above that may be the national level. To continue the example, reading remains a goal at each level. The extent to which the level achieves this goal can be measured by aggregating scores at that level. Aggregation allows entire systems to be evaluated for the quality of their outputs.

This type of exercise has been widely adopted in various national contexts to evaluate the quality of social policy programs. Some exercises target individual social service organizations. The British National Health Service (NHS) has made progressively wider use of quality measurements to assess the hospitals in its system. The rankings that result (called star ratings) are the basis for national government allocations of authority and independence to individual hospitals. The concept is that hospitals that prove effective (i.e., have high star ratings) receive autonomy. Hospitals that prove ineffective are placed under administration until they improve. In the NHS example, effectiveness concerns are used for domestic sector governance.

Other exercises compare national systems. In education, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) rankings measure national school systems on a range of outputs, including average math and reading scores. The resulting indices can be ranked because they provide internationally comparable statistics on the systems. These rankings profess to show the relative effectiveness of national systems of education.

Outputs versus Outcomes

An important concern in discussions of effectiveness is to distinguish between results that are outputs and results that are outcomes. Outputs are the immediate products of what an organization or a system of organizations does. Outcomes are wider social consequences that are related to the activity of the organization or system. The difference here is that organizations can be held accountable for failing to produce an output. But failure to produce an outcome is not as easy to attribute to a single source. Hence, including outcomes in discussions of effectiveness is difficult because a bad outcome may not be the result of a bad organization or system.

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