Ralph's Pretty-Good Grocery versus Ralph's Super Market: Separating Excellent Agencies from the Good Ones

What makes a public agency perform at a high level? Some agencies are doing extremely well in their environment and it may be because they are lucky enough to have access to plentiful resources, excellent management, and a supportive public. Unfortunately, cases such as these provide little prescriptive evidence for public managers looking to improve their own agency's performance. We apply a new quantitative technique (SWAT) to educational outcome data for 534 school districts in Texas and identify those districts doing extremely well given their fixed and often limited inputs. This approach is useful because the truly superior agencies are those that do more with less, and public managers who lead their organizations to high performance levels despite limited resources provide potential solutions to others.