Education Policy Analysis Archives (EPAA)
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The 1976 Illini: Sweet Memories of Alma Mater
Diya Dutt
The purpose of this article is to explore the attitudes of graduates of the class of 1976 from the University of Illinois toward their alma mater over a period of fifteen years. The central question addressed in this article is: How do former students feel about their educational institution as time passes? ...
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Opening up Jewish Education to Inspection: The Impact of the OFSTED Inspection System in England
Judy Keiner
Although Jewish schools in England are generally deemed successful, internal communal surveys have highlighted concerns about their teaching of Jewish studies and modern Hebrew. The UK government in 1993 established detailed national criteria for four-yearly published inspections of all schools. This imposed the need to develop criteria for the evaluation of these specifically Jewish subjects, and both schools and foundation bodies have begun to respond through training and development activities. Analysis of the first published reports, shows evidence of mismatch between Jewish schools' aims for Jewish Studies and their practice. Common findings on modern Hebrew teaching indicate concerns about planning, methodology and assessment. The response of Jewish communal bodies is explored, showing an increasing focus and some rivalry towards servicing the inspection and development needs of Jewish schools. Jewish communal press reporting and parental response to inspection is considered.
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Standard Errors in Educational Assessment: A Policy Analysis Perspective
Greg Camilli
In many educational settings, educational gains are measured and evaluated rather than absolute levels of achievement. Gains must be estimated for individual students, teachers, schools, districts, and so forth. In some educational programs, schools are required to make "statistically significant" progress over the course of one school year. This would typically require and estimate of the standard error (SE for short) of the gain, which is a number representing the precision of the gain similar to the "margin of error" in polls. Because SEs can be used to define educational targets, it is important to understand precisely what a standard error is -- and this requires going beyond the simple textbook definition. ...
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Making Molehills Out of Molehills: Reply to Lawrence Stedman's Review of The Manufactured Crisis
David C. Berliner and Bruce J. Biddle
Unfortunately, Lawrence Stedman (1996) does not honor such laudable tenets in his so-called "review" of our book, THE MANUFACTURED CRISIS, appearing in Education Policy Analysis Archives, 4(1). …
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"Staff Development Policy: Fuzzy Choices in an Imperfect Market" and Commentary
Robert T. Stout
It is argued here that staff development in the public elementary and secondary schools of the United States is misguided in both policy and practice. In its current form it represents an imperfect consumer market in which "proof of purchase" substitutes for investment in either school improvement or individual development. A policy model based on investment in school improvement is shown, in which different assumptions about how to improve schools are linked to different alternatives for the design and implementation of staff development. These are argued to be based on an investment rather than consumption model.
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The Achievement Crisis is Real: A Review of The Manufactured Crisis
Lawrence C. Stedman
A review of David Berliner and Bruce Biddle's book "The Manufactured Crisis."
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Possible Indicators of Research Quality for Colleges and Universities
Ronald H. Nowaczyk and David G. Underwood
The move toward more public accountability of institutions of higher education has focused primarily on undergraduate education. Yet, many institutions view research as an important component of their mission. Much of the literature on assessing research quality has relied on quantitative measures such as level of outside funding and number of publications generated. ...
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Restriction or Resistance? French Colonial Educational Development in Cambodia
Thomas Clayton
By 1944, after eight decades of French colonial control, only a small percentage of eligible students in Cambodia attended French schools. Several scholars argue on the basis of such evidence that the French purposefully restricted education for Cambodians in order first to achieve and then to maintain power in the colony. This article examines educational development in Cambodia during the French colonial period and concludes that the lack of Cambodian educational participation stemmed from Cambodian resistance, rather than French planning. French educational reforms sought to understand Cambodian resistance, to overcome it, and to draw Cambodians into schools dedicated to the training of colonial civil servants.
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The Matthew Principle: A West Virginia Replication?
Craig Howley
This study extends and interprets a regression technique used to examine the possible role that socioeconomic status may have in regulating the effects of school and district size on student achievement. The original study (Friedkin & Necochea, 1988), with data from California, confirmed an interaction between size and SES such that large schools benefitted affluent students, whereas small schools benefitted impoverished students. This replication applies the model to a very different state, West Virginia. ...
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Pursuit of the Ph.D.: "Survival of the Fittest," or Is It Time for a New Approach?
Scott P. Kerlin
The thesis is put forward that changes in public policy which originally promoted broad access to higher education are leading to the diminished likelihood that minorities, those from low-income backgrounds and females in underrepresented disciplines will pursue, or be able to complete, the doctorate. By reviewing a wide range of research literature and statistical reports on the status of doctoral education in the U.S. & Canada, a detailed sociological portrait of those who pursue the Ph.D. is presented. Recommendations are given for further research on doctoral education, particularly in areas of attrition,retention, student indebtedness, social stratification, and post-doctoral career plans.
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Surviving the Doctoral Years: Critical Perspectives
Scott P. Kerlin
This article probes the implications of neo-conservative public education policies for the future of the academic profession through a detailed examination of critical issues shaping contemporary doctoral education in U.S. and Canadian universities. Institutional and social factors such as financial retrenchment, declining support for affirmative action, downward economic mobility, a weak academic labor market for tenure-track faculty, professional ethics in graduate education, and backlash against women's progress form the backdrop for analysis of the author's survey of current doctoral students' opinions about funding, support, the job market, and quality of learning experiences.
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Inclusion in Elementary Schools: A Survey and Policy Analysis
Susan Allen Galis and C. Kenneth Tanner
This study of reform policy focused on inclusive education in the 1990s in the state of Georgia, United States of America. Program modifications including, individualizing instructional methods, adapting the instructional environment, and lowering maximum class size emerged as significant issues. We found that policies related to these areas were compounded by the less experienced educators not readily accepting change strategies for serving students. ...
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Toward a Theory of Thematic Curricula: Constructing New Learning Environments for Teachers & Learners
Carole Cook Freeman and Harris J. Sokoloff
A theory of thematic curriculum emerged during the development of a unit on pets, entitled Pets & Me. The unit was designed through a school/university partnership for children pre-school to grade 5. Analysis of data collected during the unit's development and field tests supports a dynamic view of curriculum that challenges policy makers to rethink policies that begin from a view of curriculum as a static list of "facts" to be learned or "topics" to be mastered. ...
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Charter Schools 1995: A Survey and Analysis of the Laws and Practices of the States
Thomas Mauhs-Pugh
Citation only
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Educational Change in Alberta, Canada: An Analysis of Recent Events
Charles F. Webber
Alberta, Canada, is the site of large-scale educational change initiatives legislated by the provincial government. The mandates have sparked heated public debate over the appropriateness, wisdom, and utility of the reforms. This article summarizes the views of representatives of several educational interest groups and offers suggestions for making change more meaningful and successful.
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Inflated Grades, Inflated Enrollment, and Inflated Budgets: An Analysis and Call for Review at the State Level
J. E. Stone
Reports of the past 13 years that call attention to deficient academic standards in American higher education are enumerated. Particular attention is given the Wingspread Group's recent An American Imperative: Higher Expectations for Higher Education. Low academic standards, grade inflation, and budgetary incentives for increased enrollment are analyzed and a call is made for research at the state level. Reported trends in achievement and GPAs are extrapolated to Tennessee and combined with local data to support the inference that 15% of the state's present day college graduates would not have earned a diploma by mid 1960s standards.
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Language Choice and Global Learning Networks: The Pitfall of Lingua Franca Approaches to Classroom Telecomputing
Dennis Sayers
How can other languages be used in conjunction with English to further intercultural and multilingual learning when teachers and students participate in computer-based global learning networks? Two portraits are presented of multilingual activities in the Orillas and I*EARN learning networks, and are discussed as examples of the principal modalities of communication employed in networking projects between distant classes. ...
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Brave New Reductionism: TQM as Ethnocentrism
Dionysios Dennis
At century's end, practices at institutions of higher education are regularly subjected to a numbing array of stresses. Under the umbrella of fiscal austerity, intensified regimes of surveillance, in the form of corporatist management philosophies such as Total Quality Management (TQM), have been widely imposed. TQM proponents now advocate the total managementof human thought and identity. In a blatantly econometric and ethnocentric discourse where human variability is a "virus" to be "eliminated" under a war metaphor, nothing less than the future of independent intellectual work is at stake. This essay primarily explores how the theoretical roots and contemporary tropes of TQM shape a range of TQM-effects.
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Review of Eric A. Hanushek's Making Schools Work
Herbert Gintis
Making Schools Work is about the economics of educational policy. The Brookings Institution, publisher of the volume, is among the most respected institutions of economic policy research in the United States. The analysis and recommendations offered by Eric Hanushek, Professor of Economics at the University of Rochester, are based on original research financed by the Pew Charitable Trusts, and carried out by a distinguished group of economists.
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Getting a Grip on the Good Life: Essay Review of Alan DeYoung's The Life and Death of a Rural American High School: Farewell Little Nanawha
Craig Howley and Paul Theobald
Alan DeYoung's story of the circumstances surrounding the birth, growth, and death of a high school in rural West Virginia is an intellectual contribution of the first order. And Farewell Little Kanawha is certainly one of the best stories to be told by an educational researcher in recent decades. Its strength derives in large measure from DeYoung's deftness in crossing disciplinary borders. The interplay of economics, sociology, history (both oral and documentary), anthropology, and biography render this story far more compelling than most educational research. ...
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Educational Assessment Reassessed: The Usefulness of Standardized and Alternative Measures of Student Achievement as Indicators for the Assessment of Educational Outcomes
William L. Sanders and Sandra P. Horn
For decades, the assessment of educational entities--school systems, individual schools, and teachers--has evoked strong and sometimes violent emotions from the educational community, the general public, and their legislative representatives. In spite of attempts to codify standards for the evaluation of these entities, assessment experts remain denominationalized--often religiously so. ... Reflecting this more moderate perspective, this paper strongly advocates the use of multiple indicators of student learning, including those provided by standardized tests.
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Diversifying Finance of Higher Education Systems in the Third World: The Cases of Kenya and Mongolia
John C. Weidman
In countries throughout the world, there are increasing pressures to reduce the government share of costs for goods and services with high payoffs to individuals so that the limited available public funds can be used for other needs. This paper suggests several strategies for reducing government expenditures on higher education, including direct cost recovery, grants from and contracts with external agencies, income-producing enterprises, private contributions, and expansion of the private sector. Policy implications and examples (e.g., student access and financial aid, tax status of revenues from enterprises, deferred cost recovery) are presented for both developing and developed countries.
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Beginning Teachers Programs: Analysis of State Actions During the Reform Era
Carol B. Furtwengler
This article reports the findings from the conduct of a 50- state survey to determine the status of state requirements and state components of beginning teacher programs instituted from 1983 to 1992. The article discusses the implementation of beginning teacher programs during the 1980s reform movement and describes the methodology used for the study. ...
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State Actions for Personnel Evaluation: Analysis of Reform Policies, 1983-1992
Carol B. Furtwengler
This article is an analysis four major policy issues associated with state actions for personnel evaluation from 1983 to 1992 and provides descriptive information about state policy actions taken during those years. ...
