Sustainable Educational Resource Governance in General Senior High Schools: Efficiency Evaluation and Configurational Pathways from 882 Schools in China

Efficient and equitable allocation of educational resources is fundamental to building sustainable education systems and achieving inclusive, equitable, and quality education under Sustainable Development Goal 4. This study employs the slack-based measure (SBM) model to evaluate the resource allocation efficiency of 882 regular senior high schools in China and applies configurational analysis to explore multiple pathways toward high efficiency. The results show that, first, the overall resource allocation efficiency of regular senior high schools, measured through educational outputs related to talent cultivation, remains at a moderately low level. Both overall technical efficiency and pure technical efficiency have substantial room for improvement. The primary challenge in current resource allocation lies not in scale imbalance but in insufficient resource utilization, low internal governance efficiency, and weak capacity to transform existing resources into educational outcomes under current operational scales. Second, significant disparities in resource allocation efficiency are observed across urban–rural locations, school ownership types, and school tiers, revealing a notable “resource-abundance paradox”: schools with relatively limited resources may achieve higher resource utilization efficiency. Third, high resource allocation efficiency is not driven by isolated factors, but by the synergistic interaction of multiple conditions. Four distinct pathways to high efficiency are identified, in which principal instructional leadership recurrently appears as a core condition across the identified sufficient configurations. Accordingly, this study proposes targeted policy implications for improving resource allocation efficiency in regular senior high education, including establishing a performance-oriented resource allocation system, promoting categorized governance and differentiated policy design, strengthening school-based empowerment and internal governance mechanisms, and developing a data-driven monitoring and decision-making framework for educational resources.