Education Policy Analysis Archives (EPAA)
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Responding to the Education Reform Agenda: A Study of School Superintendents' Instructional Leadership
Paul V. Bredeson and Brad W. Kose
Education reforms have affected schools and the educators who work in them. Using state-wide survey data from 1993 and 2003, this study examines how the work of school superintendents has been affected over a ten-year period by these reform initiatives, especially increased demands for accountability. The general message from our data is that superintendents are interested in curriculum and instruction and believe these are important tasks, but the daily realities of their work often subvert even the most committed professional. Further, the data indicate that superintendents may be able to use external accountability mechanisms as levers to move the internal accountability systems to support improved teaching and learning.
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Cambio Curricular en el Bachillerato Tecnológico Mexicano: El Caso de la Disciplina de Ciencia, Tecnología, Sociedad y Valores
Guadalupe Tinajero Villavicencio, Guadalupe López Bonilla, and Carmen Pérez Fragoso
This article reports partial results of a research project that attempts, among other things, to identify the scope of educational policies concerning structural reforms to the Mexican high school curriculum. In particular, it covers the curricular reform implemented during the 2004-2005 school year in vocational technological high schools, paying special attention to teacher’s adoption of the new pedagogical proposal. ...
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Digital Equity in Education: A Multilevel Examination of Differences in Relationships between Computer Access, Computer Use and State-level Technology Policies
Jonathan D. Becker
Using data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) state assessment and a survey of state-level technology policies, this study examined digital equity in education as a multilevel organizational phenomenon with data from 70,382 students in 3,479 schools and 40 states....
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La Democratización de la Gestión Escolar en la Argentina: Una Comparación de Políticas Provinciales
Jorge M. Gorostiaga
This article analyses some of the main school management reforms implemented at the provincial level from the mid-1980s in Argentina, and relates them to the national policies and to global trends regarding the governance of educational systems. It is argued that democratic and participatory proposals, which responded to a great extent to the return of the country to political democracy, began to give ground as the provinces focused on administrative rationalization and as the national government promoted a concept of school autonomy based on educational quality and efficiency criteria defined at the central level. On the other hand, participatory policies and programs faced various obstacles that originated in a context of social inequality, the prevailing institutional cultures, and the lack of a clear idea about the requirements and implications of implementing democratic practices at schools
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Hugging the Middle: Teaching in an Era of Testing and Accountability, 1980-2005
Larry Cuban
In the last quarter-century and especially the last decade, testing and accountability have come to dominate education policy at the state and national levels. The common concern about the effects of such testing is that it reshapes teaching in the classroom. But such claims do not look at the evidence of deeper classroom structures (the mix of teacher-centered and student-centered practices) in historical context. This article extends historical research in How Teachers Taught (Cuban, 1993) to the present in three metropolitan school districts. While testing and accountability have become more obvious concerns of teachers, the hybridized classroom environment documented in How Teachers Taught have become more pervasive. This article documents this continuing ubiquity and addresses the apparent inconsistency between evidence of a hybridized classroom environment and the unintended consequences of testing and accountability.
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Factores de sesgo asociados a la validez de la evaluación docente universitaria: un modelo jerárquico lineal
Raziel Acevedo Álvarez and Nuria Mairena Rodríguez
The present study analyzes the variables that are intrinsically linked with the student, professor and class environment in relation to the university educational evaluation questionnaires. The participants in the study were 374 students with an age mean of 19.9 and 29 professors with an age mean of 36 from 3 different departments at the Universidad de Costa Rica (UCR) at the city of Guanacaste. The hierarchical lineal models were used for the data analysis, a quantitative methodology which facilitates the evaluation of the determinants which affect the results of the study. However, only four of these determinants were associated with the evaluation concerned, class size, enrolment year, department type and forecasted achievement levels. The results obtained from the study demonstrate that these kinds of evaluation are valid despite the results being slightly affected by a range of factors from externalities to teacher competence.
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Comparison of the Enrollment Percentages of Magnet and Non-Magnet Schools in a Large Urban School District
Emily Arcia
Are magnet schools in a position to meet diversity ideals? As districts are declaredunitary and released from court ordered desegregation, many are framing their commitments to fairness and equity in terms of diversity—i.e., comparable rates of participation and comparable educational outcomes in all segments the student population. In this study, the enrollment statistics for magnet and contiguous non-magnet public schools in Miami-Dade County Public Schools, a large, urban district that had been released from court ordered desegregation, were compared to each other and to district enrollment averages at two time points: the year the district was declared unitary and four years hence. Findings indicated that within four years of being declared unitary, the gains that the magnet schools had made with regards to Black/non-Black desegregation had eroded substantially. Also, in the four year span, magnet schools had not made significant strides in meeting the diversity ideals adopted by the district at being released from supervision by the court. These findings highlight the difficulty of attaining diversity in student enrollment characteristics when quotas are not used and suggest that recruitment and enrollment policies must be crafted with care if districts are to achieve diversity goals.
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La escuela en el mundo campesino quechua: tensiones socioculturales entre modos de socialización de conocimientos
Jaime Zambrana Vargas
The implementation of State educational reforms has sidestepped the reality of a heterogeneous society and Bolivia’s cultural diversity. The pedagogic models of formal schooling have been thrust upon a rural world and fail to respond to the needs and socio-cultural interests of an indigenous peasant youth. As a result, the institutionalized school—an instrument geared toward homogenizing the culture—has failed to be sensitive to diverse indigenous cosmic visions, which has historically and repeatedly resulted in cultural conflicts, bargaining and mediation. This study takes a socio-historical perspective to qualitatively analyze the tensions between the modes of socialization of knowledge—formal schooling vs. peasant community—in the transformative processes of the State education system. From the perceptions and interactions of the educational social actors, the modes of socialization—as cultural and pedagogical phenomena—reveal a complexity of manifestations regarding meaning/significance from the distinct cosmic visions of the different actors. The study reveals and contrasts the characteristics and inter-relationships of the different visions and discourses in the forms of socialization between formal schooling and the peasant community in the context of implementing State educational reform at the municipal level.
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No More Aggregate NAEP Studies?
Sherman Dorn
This editorial reviews recent studies of accountability policies using National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data and compares the use of aggregate NAEP data to the availability of individual-level data from NAEP. …
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Relationships between High-Stakes Testing Policies and Student Achievement after Controlling for Demographic Factors in Aggregated Data
Gregory J. Marchant, Sharon E. Paulson, and Adam Shunk
With the mandate of No Child Left Behind, high-stakes achievement testing is firmly in place in every state. The few studies that have explored the effectiveness of high-stakes testing using NAEP scores have yielded mixed results. This study considered state demographic characteristics for each NAEP testing period in reading, writing, mathematics, and science from 1992 through 2002, in an effort to examine the relation of high-stakes testing policies to achievement and changes in achievement between testing periods. As expected, demographic characteristics and their changes were related significantly to most achievement outcomes, but high-stakes testing policies demonstrated few relationships with achievement. The few relationships between high-stakes testing and achievement or improvement in reading, writing, or science tended to appear only when demographic data were missing; and the minimal relationships with math achievement were consistent with findings in previous research. Considering the cost and potential unintended negative consequences, high-stakes testing policies seem to provide a questionable means of improving student learning.
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Un Estudio Multinivel Basado en PISA 2003: Factores de Eficacia Escolar en el área de Matemáticas
Covadonga Ruiz de Minguel and María Castro Morera
This article presents a school effectiveness multilevel model based on PISA 2003 data. Our focus is math achievement. We employ a three level model (student, school and country) with variables related to school effectiveness as predictors of student achievement. We use a methodology that takes into account the multiple plausible values generated by PISA for each student. Results show that family structure, gender, family and school socioeconomic status, home educational resources, quality of school resources, student educational expenditures, school size, teacher education and country economic resources devoted to education all have sizable influence in mathematic achievement.
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School Size, Student Achievement, and the "Power Rating" of Poverty: Substantive Finding or Statistical Artifact?
Theodore Coladarci
The proportion of variance in student achievement that is explained by student SES—“poverty’s power rating,” as some call it—tends to be lower among smaller schools than among larger schools. Smaller schools, many claim, are able to somehow disrupt the seemingly axiomatic association between SES and student achievement. Using eighth-grade data for 216 public schools in Maine, I explored the hypothesis that this in part is a statistical artifact of the greater volatility (lower reliability) of school-aggregated student achievement in smaller schools. ...
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Las Universidades Argentinas en el Contexto de las Políticas de los 90s: El Caso de la Licenciatura de Articulación en Ciencias de la Educación de la UNICEN
Iris Richmond
This article analyses the changes caused by the implementation of an articulated degree in Educational Sciences at the Universidad Nacional at Centro de la Provincia in Buenos Aires (Argentina). This educational program should be understood within the framework provided by the structural reforms of the educational system, promoted by the national government in the 1990’s with the intention of restructuring the State–Society relations. This program that appeared to be promoting the democratization of access to the university system was transformed into a market mechanism, for the provision of financial resources to the university by selling “knowledge” to graduates from teacher education programs.
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Curriculum as Praxis: Ensuring Quality Technical Education in Singapore for the 21st Century
Tiew Ming Yek and Dawn Penney
... This paper provides a review of the contemporary education system and curriculum in Singapore with a focus on technical education and training vis-à-vis a vision of education and training in and for postmodern knowledge societies. Suggestions are made on how the technical education and training sector in Singapore can further develop and thrive in the 21st century, while continuing to be accessible and of high quality.
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La Mirada del Otro en los Dispositivos de Formación de Lenguas Extranjeras: Isomorfismos de la Política Lingüística y la Mediación
Teresa Yurén and Cony Saenger
The case of the bachelor degrees for French teachers in Mexico is analyzed in order to show how the ways of looking at the other and be looked by the other can impact the mediation types and the treatment of the cultural distances, which in turn rebounds in the appropriation of the foreign language, the configuration of the professional ethos and the acquisition of competences for self-formation. Qualitative data were obtained by means of interviews, observations and collection of documents and the work was done by combining structural analysis, representation analysis, analysis of identity, genealogy and political discourse analysis.
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Funding for Performance and Equity: Student Success in English Further Education Colleges
Ozan Jaquette
The impact of performance funding on community college student outcomes is a contested issue. Performance funding policies in most U.S. states involve too small a proportion of funding to change college behavior. English further education colleges are similar to U.S. community colleges. 1992 policy reforms in England centralized policy control, and implemented a per-pupil funding formula; 10% of all funding is based on student success but other components of the funding formula pay colleges more money for enrolling disadvantaged students. This research uses five years of student level data to test the impact of these policies. Overall student success rates rose by 10% during the five-year period, with the largest gains made by ethnic minorities, adult basic education students, and students from disadvantaged neighborhoods. Although the English system depends on regulatory agencies that do not exist in the U.S., the major assertion of this research is that market-based funding policies - if properly designed - can promote equity in educational achievement.
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NCLB: Local Implementation and Impact in Southwest Washington State
Linda Mabry and Jason Margolis
The research reported here is from the first two years of an ongoing and largely qualitative study to examine the impact of the No Child Left Behind federal education policy on educational practice and climate in elementary schools in two districts in southwest Washington. Based on systematic drop-in observations in classrooms and interviews with teachers and school and district administrators, data indicated that the policy had partially yielded the intended standards-based reforms but at considerable local cost. While most participating administrators described efforts to use NCLB to leverage needed change, most teachers described struggles to sustain best practice and to avoid some negative consequences to their students and schools. Administrators anticipated that resistant teachers would be nudged from the profession, and the greatest attrition among participating teachers was from the fourth-grade level at which the state’s standards-based test was administered. Fourth-grade teachers particularly expressed concern about test- related stress and test-driven curricula interfering with children’s individual needs and with their own ability to provide developmentally appropriate instruction adapted for their particular students. The validity and utility of test results was a local issue.
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Conceitos de Educação e Escolaridade entre Mulheres Clientes de um Centro de Saúde do Rio De Janeiro
Isabela Cabral Félix de Sousa and Fundação Oswaldo Cruz
This work has the objective to evaluate concepts of education and schooling reported by women attending a Public Health Clinic in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Using a qualitative research methodology, the selection of women for 60 interviews followed two criteria of maximum variation in the sampling for both the hour of the interview as well as the age of the women. The results indicate that these women had little schooling and a few if any opportunity to take part of educational non-formal courses. The concepts of education and schooling were divided into the following categories: adequate social behavior, value, professional development, health and lack of schooling. This research concludes that it is pressing to develop educational projects taking into account what is significant from these women's perspective in regard to education and school, what would be decisive to promote their citizenship.
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The Eight-Year Study: From Evaluative Research to Demonstration Project, 1930-1940
Joseph Watras
From 1932 to 1940, the Progressive Education Association (PEA) conducted its Eight-Year Study. At first, the study appeared to be a poorly funded comparison of two groups of students in secondary schools. During the last four years, as more financial support became available, the Eight-Year Study became a broadly based demonstration of a wide range of educational innovations. For contemporary educators, the story of the Eight-Year Study represents an opportunity to reconsider popular principles of program evaluation such as utilization-focused evaluation or program theory in evaluation. Rather than set plans in advance, the PEA members seemed to follow the ideas of John Dewey; they allowed the purposes to widen and broaden as the study evolved. In this way, the Eight-Year Study represented a model of democratic policy evaluation. Its tentative type of planning allowed people to set and to change their own purposes in line with the needs of the wider organization. Part of the reason that the study changed direction was it gathered more financial support and could add consultants who worked in distinct program elements. In addition, the lack of consistency matched the varied nature that characterized the founding members of the PEA. Its democratic framework may have enabled the Eight-Year Study to become the PEA’s abiding contribution to American education.
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Federal, State, and District Level English Language Learning Program Entry and Exit Requirements: Effects on the Education of Language Minority Learners
Alex Ragan and Nonie Lesaux
Identification of a language minority learner for placement in a program for English Language Learners (ELLs), and the length of the support program, may have a significant effect on the student's academic achievement. Widespread anecdotal evidence suggests that criteria used to make placement decisions vary widely across the U.S. This study systematically examines related federal laws and guidance, as well as published entry and exit criteria for ELL programs for the 10 states and 10 districts in the U.S. with the largest enrollment of ELLs. For the majority of placement decisions, a measure of English proficiency is used. Very few states and districts rely on multiple sources of information for these decisions. The ramifications of these findings are discussed in light of the language and content demands of the mainstream classroom.
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El Impacto de la Formación Permanente del Profesorado de Educación Secundaria en los Resultados Escolares
Paula González-Vallinas, David Oterino, and José Luis San Fabián
Studies dealing with factors which have an influence on students outcomes are reviewed, teacher variables and teacher training are among their most common findings to influence school achievement. This study analyses the variable in-service teacher training on students’ academic achievement. The analysis levels are departments and schools, being department the level where the relation among variables is more significative. There are significative correlations between the in-service teacher training in their own subject and the subject pedagogy in 50% of the analysed departments. In-service teacher training is recommended to be organized, taking into account these differences (context, teacher variables, in- service teacher training variables) among departments, schools and districts to compensate the unequal school variables.
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Problemas Técnicos y Usos Políticos de las Evaluaciones Nacionales en el Sistema Educativo Argentino
Silvina Gvirtz, Silvina Larripa, and Verónica Oelsner
This article presents results from different research investigations which have explored the relations between the technical and the political dimension of the assessment of educational systems. The case study taken on for this matter is the national evaluation system in force in Argentina since 1993. In the first part we present some technical problems which the implementation of this system has encountered in this country. In the second part we carry out an analysis of these technical inconveniences, within the political context of educational reform in which the evaluation system arises and develops. In addition, we present an analysis of the effective use of the information provided by the evaluations. Finally, in the conclusions, we present some considerations on the role of national evaluations in educational reform contexts, and on the prospects of their consolidation as systems which inform in a valid and reliable form about the course of education in the mid and long term.
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On Ideology, Casual Inference and the Reification of Statistical Methods: Reflections on "Examining Instruction, Achievement and Equity with NAEP Mathematics Data"
Harold Wenglinsky
The purpose of this article is to comment on the prior article entitled “Examining Instruction, Achievement and Equity with NAEP mathematics data,” by Sarah Theule Lubienski. That article claims that a prior article by the author suffered from three weaknesses: (1) An attempt to justify No Child Left Behind (NCLB); (2) drawing causal inferences from cross-sectional data; (3) and various statistical quibbles. The author responds to the first claim, by indicating that any mention of NCLB was intended purely to make the article relevant to a policy journal; to the second claim, by noting his own reservations about using cross-sectional data to draw causal inferences; and to the third claim by noting potential issues of quantitative methodology in the Lubienski article. He concludes that studies that use advanced statistical methods are often so opaque as to be difficult to compare, and suggests some advantages to the quantitative transparency that comes from the findings of randomly controlled field trials.
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Perceptions of the Impact of Accountability on the Role of Principals
James E. Lyons and Bob Algozzine
Calls for accountability in America’s schools have created increased responsibilities for educational leaders. In this article, we describe and discuss a study of elementary, middle, and high school principals’ perceptions of the state-wide educational accountability program in North Carolina. The respondents indicated that the state’s accountability program has had its greatest impact on how they monitored student achievement, aligned the curriculum to the testing program, provided student remedial or tutorial opportunities, assigned teachers to grades levels or subjects, and protected instructional time. Views of some components, such as measures of school effectiveness, school safety standards, expectations and promotion standards for students, and financial bonuses received by staff members in schools that meet expected achievement standards, were viewed favorably. In contrast, the No Child Left Behind Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) requirement (incorporated into the state’s accountability program), testing requirements for Limited English Proficiency students and special education students, the sanctions applied to schools that do not meet expected growth, and the school status designation labels that are applied to schools based upon student achievement were perceived more negatively. The predictable and unpredictable outcomes of a mandated accountability program on the perceptions (and behavior) of school principals create important considerations which are discussed for policy-makers and other professionals dealing with standards-based reform.
