Education Policy Analysis Archives (EPAA)
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An Overview of Private Education Development in Modern China
Zeyu Xu
… This paper looked into the modern history of private education in China and found that such a huge resurgence of private education is rooted in the heritage of private education in the Chinese society. Private schools were the precursor of modern Chinese education. ...
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Senior School Board Officials' Perceptions of a National Achievement Assessment Program
Marielle Simon and Renée Forgette-Giroux
The School Achievement Indicators Program (SAIP) has been collecting data across Canada on 13- and 16-year-old student achievement in mathematics, in science, and in reading and writing since 1993. In 1999, it completed its second assessment cycle and was reviewed in Spring 2000. The review design included a survey of officials from all the school boards/districts that participated in the science assessment program held in 1999. ...
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Corrective Action and School Choice in NYC: An Analysis of District Funding Applications
Doug Hamman and E. Allen Schenck
Districts play a critical role in reforming schools. In January 2000, NYC community school districts applied for Title I, IASA, funding to carry out corrective actions against historically low-performing schools. Our purpose was to examine (a) how districts planned to take corrective action to address problems that cause low performance; and (b) the extent to which school choice could be implemented in those districts which were applying for corrective action funding. ...
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Assessment of a Socio-constructivist Model for Teacher Training: A Case Study
Luiz Antonio Joia
This article assesses a socio-constructivist model for training K-12 teachers in Brazil, in the use of Informatics in education. The method applied combines both face-to-face exchanges and a WEB-based distance approach made possible by Internet technology. The characteristics of such training and its main objectives are analyzed according to the collected data presented. ...
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Attracting Principals to the Superintendency: Conditions that Make a Difference to Principals
Aimee Howley, Edwina Pendarvis, and Thomas Gibbs
Responding to a perceived shortage of school superintendents in Ohio as well as elsewhere in the nation, this study examined the conditions of the job that make it attractive or unattractive as a career move for principals. ...
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Legislating Equity: The Distribution of Emergency Permit Teachers in California
Laura Goe
There is a significant negative relationship between the percentage of teachers on emergency permits and student achievement at the school level in California schools, after controlling for other student and school characteristics. Generally, the more emergency permit teachers there are in a school, the lower the school's achievement. This phenomenon is examined in the context of other contributors to student achievement such as socio-economic status and school size. ...
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Globalización, gobierno y transferencia de políticas públicas. El caso de la educación superior en México
Pedro Flores Crespo and Salvador Ruiz de Chávez
Globalization and governance pave the way for the ocurrence of policy transfer processes. This article shows that higher education policy in Mexico has been historically influenced by foreign educational models. ...
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The Original Ten: A Multisite Case Study of Florida's Millennium High School Reform Model
Carol A. Mullen
This study should have immediate utility for the United States and beyond its borders. School-to-work approaches to comprehensive reform are increasingly expected of schools while legislative funding for this purpose gets pulled back. This multisite case study launches the first analysis of the New Millennium High School (NMHS) model in Florida. ...
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Recovering Policy Implementation: Understanding Implementation through Informal Communication
Lee S. Duemer
This study identifies themes in the theoretical literature on policy implementation that can then be used to develop a research-based framework for the scholar about how qualitative research can be used to analyze policy implementation through the investigation of informal and formal communication lines. ...
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District Fiscal Policy and Student Achievement: Evidence from Combined NAEP-CCD Data
Gary G. Huang and Binbing Yu
School restructuring raises questions about the role of school districts in improving student learning. Centralization by state governments and decentralization to individual schools as proposed in systemic reform leave districts' role unsettled. Empirical research on the district role in the context of ongoing reform is inadequate. This analysis of combined data from the NAEP and the Common Core of Data (CCD) was intended to address the issue. ...
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Research and Rhetoric on Teacher Certification: A Response to "Teacher Certification Reconsidered"
Linda Darling-Hammond
… This article documents the many inaccuracies in the Abell Foundation paper and describes the actual findings of many of the studies it purports to review, as well as the findings of other studies it ignores. ...
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The Effectiveness of "Teach for America" and Other Under-certified Teachers on Student Academic Achievement: A Case of Harmful Public Policy
Ildiko Laczko-Kerr and David C. Berliner
The academic achievements of students taught by under-certified primary school teachers were compared to the academic achievements of students taught by regularly certified primary school teachers. This sample of under-certified teachers included three types of under-qualified personnel: emergency, temporary and provisionally certified teachers. One subset of these under-certified teachers was from the national program "Teach For America (TFA)."
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Aprender a Enseñar Para La Sociedad del Conocimiento
Carlos Marcelo
… In this article we review the literature of teacher learning and teacher knowledge from the point of view of new challenges presented by the knowledge society.
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Charter School Funding Issues
Stephen D. Sugarman
Although a great deal has been written about charter schools, rather little attention has been given to their funding. The first part of this article raises four current issues in the funding of regular public schools across the U.S. and shows how these issues carry over to the funding of charter schools. The second part explores four additional issues that have arisen in the funding of charter schools that go to the core identity of charter schools and the nature of the students they enroll. In both parts, extra attention is paid to developments in California, one of the most active charter school states.
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The Politics of School-Based Management: Understanding the Process of Devolving Authority in Urban School Districts
Elaime M. Walker
... This paper discusses the findings of a recently conducted study on school-based management in thirty of New Jersey's poorest districts (referred to as the Abbott Districts). These districts have begun a process of complex reform after the State's Supreme Court ruled that the state had failed to constitutionally provide a thorough and efficient education for its poorest students by the absence of parity funding. ...
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The Geographical Distribution of Teacher Absenteeism in Large Urban School District Settings: Implications for School Reform Efforts Aimed at Promoting Equity and Excellence in Education
James E. Bruno
… This study combines school district data gathering mechanisms on teacher absence rates at school sites with Geographical Information Systems (G.I.S.) to map the association between a school's geographical environmental space and the propensity for teacher absence.
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The Question of the Student in Educational Reform
David P. Ericson and Frederick S. Ellett Jr.
In pursuing the goals of educational reform over the past several decades, educational policy makers have focused on teachers, administrators, and school structures as keys to higher educational achievement. As the would-be beneficiaries of reform, students, and their interaction with the educational system, have been almost entirely overlooked in the pursuit of educational excellence. ...
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Teacher Inequality: New Evidence on Disparities in Teachers' Academic Skills
Andrew J. Wayne
… This article turns attention to teachers' academic skills. National data on teachers' entrance examination scores and college selectivity reveal substantial disparities by school poverty level. The findings commend attention to the gap in academic skills in the formulation of future policy and research on the teacher quality gap.
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A Case Study of Professional Development Expenditures at a Restructured High School
Sarah Archibald and H. Alix Gallagher
This article is an analysis of professional development spending in a recently restructured urban high school. This study describes the school's restructuring effort, the ways in which professional development in the school supports the effort, and the ways in which the school reallocated resources to create funds for professional development spending.
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Elm Street School: A Case Study of Professional Development Expenditures
H. Alix Gallagher
This article addresses the question of how much is spent on teachers' professional development. A review of the literature finds two problems that have frequently led to inaccurate estimates of professional development spending: 1) the accounting codes that are used in many studies provide little description of spending, and 2) studies generally focus on district or state expenditures for professional development, but do not collect data on school-level spending. ...
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Mentoring Narratives ON-LINE: Teaching the Principalship
Alison I. Griffith and Svitlana Taraban
… This article reports on the new model of principals' training that has been used in York University's Principals' Qualification Program (PQP) from the late 1990s onward. One component of the program brings traditional case methodology into a computer-mediated/on-line environment. The on-line cases are narratives from the everyday lives of the Ontario school administrators who serve as mentors in the on-line environment. ...
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Home Schooling in the United States: Trends and Characteristics
Kurt J. Bauman
... This report uses the 1994 October CPS, and the National Household Education Survey of 1996 and 1999 to examine popular characterizations of the home school population. The article assembles evidence from several sources to confirm that home schooling is growing. ...
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Policy and Practice: Restructuring Teachers' Work
Lisa Kirtman
Despite repeated attempts to reform schools, teachers' work has remained surprisingly stable. The purpose of this study was to investigate implementation of a state-funded restructuring initiative that intended broad changes in teachers' professional roles. ...
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Lake Woebeguaranteed: Misuse of Test Scores in Massachusetts, Part I
Walt Haney
Misuse of test results in Massachusetts largely guarantees woes for both students and schools. Analysis of annual test score averages for close to 1000 Massachusetts schools for four years (1998–2001) shows that test score gains in one testing period tend to be followed by losses in the next. School averages are especially volatile in relatively small schools (with less than 150 students tested per grade). ...
