Education Policy Analysis Archives (EPAA)
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Does Teacher Preparation Matter? Evidence about Teacher Certification, Teach for America, and Teacher Effectiveness
Linda Darling-Hammond, Deborah J. Holtzman, Su Jin Gatlin, and Julian Vasquez Heilig
Recent debates about the utility of teacher education have raised questions about whether certified teachers are, in general, more effective than those who have not met the testing and training requirements for certification, and whether some candidates with strong liberal arts backgrounds might be at least as effective as teacher education graduates. This study examines these questions with a large student-level data set from Houston, Texas that links student characteristics and achievement with data about their teachers’ certification status, experience, and degree levels from 1995–2002. ...
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On School Choice and Test-Based Accountability
Damian W. Betebenner, Kenneth R. Howe, and Samara S. Foster
Among the two most prominent school reform measures currently being implemented in The United States are school choice and test-based accountability. Until recently, the two policy initiatives remained relatively distinct from one another. With the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), a mutualism between choice and accountability emerged whereby school choice complements test-based accountability. In the first portion of this study we present a conceptual overview of school choice and test-based accountability and explicate connections between the two that are explicit in reform implementations like NCLB or implicit within the market-based reform literature in which school choice and test-based accountability reside. In the second portion we scrutinize the connections, in particular, between school choice and test-based accountability using a large western school district with a popular choice system in place. ...
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A Forced March for Failing Schools: Lessons from the New York City Chancellor's District
Deinya Phenix, Dorothy Siegel, Ariel Zaltsman, and Norm Fruchter
In the mid-nineties, the New York City Schools Chancellor created a citywide improvement zone to take over a significant proportion of the city’s lowest performing schools whose local community school districts had failed to improve them. This “Chancellor’s District” defined centralized management, rather than local control, as the critical variable necessary to initiate, enforce and ensure the implementation of school improvement. This large-scale intervention involved both a governance change and a set of capacity-building interventions presumably unavailable under local sub-district control. Our study retrospectively examined the origins, structure and components of the Chancellor’s District, and analyzed the characteristics and outcomes of the elementary schools mandated to receive these interventions. ...
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Educación y Formación para el Trabajo en Argentina: Resignificación y Desafíos en la Perspectiva de los Jóvenes y Adultos
Graciela C. Riquelme and Natalia Herger
This paper argues that the combined effects of the criticisms to the Welfare State’s inefficiency and poor performance, the introduction of “modernizing policies” and market mechanisms handicapped the Argentinean system of adult education causing its diversification and dispersion. ...
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Addressing the Disproportionate Representation of Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students in Special Education through Culturally Responsive Educational Systems
Janette K. Klinger, Alfredo J. Artiles, Elizabeth Jozleski, Beth Harry, and Shelly Zion
In this article, we present a conceptual framework for addressing the disproportionate representation of culturally and linguistically diverse students in special education. The cornerstone of our approach to addressing disproportionate representation is through the creation of culturally responsive educational systems. ...
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Response to "What Do Klein et al. Tell Us About Test Scores in Texas?"
Stephen P. Klein, Laura S. Hamilton, Daniel F. McCaffrey, and Brian M. Stecher
We have reviewed the article by Toenjes (2005). Below we summarize our responses.
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What Do Klein et al. Tell Us About Test Scores in Texas?
Laurence A. Toenjes
A paper appearing in this journal by Klein, Hamilton, McCaffrey and Stecher (2000) attempted to raise serious questions about the validity of the gains in student performance as measured by Texas’ standardized test, the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS). Part of their analysis was based on the results of three tests which they administered to 2,000 fifth grade students in 20 Texas schools. Although Klein et al. indicated that the 20 schools were not selected in a way which would insure that they were representative of the nearly 3,000 Texas schools that enrolled fifth graders, generalizations based upon the results for those schools were nonetheless offered. The purpose of this short paper is to demonstrate just how unrepresentative the 20 schools used by Klein et al. actually were, and in so doing to cast doubt on certain of their conclusions.
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Capital Humano: Su Definicion y Alcances en el Desarrollo Local y Regional
Iván Navarro Abarzúa
This article describes and analyzes the concept of Human Capital nor in a mechanical way nor using the neo-liberal definitions, but by linking the theory with practice in an specific territorial analysis. ...
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Componentes del Nuevo Campo Intelectual de la Educación y la Pedagogía en Venezuela (1994-2000)
Antonio Arellano Duque
This investigation is inscribed in the field of school reform and proposes to use the concept of Intellectual Field of Education and Pedagogy as a meaningful approach to study educational and pedagogical changes happening in Venezuela during the years 1994-2000. This study reconstructs thematic universes through content analysis of key documents and discourses about education to identify the relevant paradigms and general tendencies in educational development.
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Conflicting Demands of No Child Left Behind and State Systems: Mixed Messages about School Performance
Robert L. Linn
An ever-increasing reliance on student performance on tests holds schools and educators accountable both to state accountability systems and also to the accountability requirements of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001. While each state has constructed its own definition of Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) requirements within the confines of NCLB, substantial differences between the accountability requirements of many state systems and NCLB still have resulted in mixed messages regarding the performance of schools. ...
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Academic Freedom, Tenure, and Student Evaluations of Faculty: A Response to Haskell and His Critics
Edith J. Cisneros-Cohernour
I comment on the strengths and limitations of Haskell's article and provide a critical review of his arguments about the negative impact of SEF on tenure and other administrative decisions. I object to the limited evidence supporting the claim that the use of student evaluations per se challenges academic freedom.
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La Universidad de las Mil y Una Noches
Luis Porter
… The article departs from a hypothetical question an academic asks him/herself in his way to the educational institution where he-she works: What is my university? What makes me change from enthusiasm to deception, from pain to happiness?
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Toward an Objective Evaluation of Teacher Performance: The Use of Variance Partioning Analysis, VPA
Eduardo R. Alicias Jr.
Evaluation of teacher performance is usually done with the use of ratings made by students, peers, and principals or supervisors, and at times, self-ratings made by the teachers themselves. The trouble with this practice is that it is obviously subjective, and vulnerable to what Glass and Martinez call the "politics of teacher evaluation," as well as to professional incapacities of the raters.
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Antecedents and Consequences of Residential Choice and School Transfer
Toni Falbo, Robert W. Glover, W. Lee Holcombe, and S. Lynne Stokes
This article examines the antecedents and consequences of residential choice and school transfers within one of the eight largest urban school districts in Texas. This study is based on survey data from a representative sample of parents of K-12 students enrolled in this district. ...
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Savings Education: Learning the Value of Self-Control
Patricia A. Hutton and James M. Holmes
This article proposes a funded school-based allowance and savings program targeted at economically disadvantaged students with poor educational outcomes to help poor children develop less present-biased time preference patterns so as to increase student effort and skills acquisition, avoid the pitfalls that pave the path of adolescence and move from poverty to middle class status as adults. ...
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O crescimento da educação superior privada no Brasil: implicações para as questões de eqüidade, qualidade e benefício público
Tristan McCowan
There has been a dramatic growth in private higher education in Brazil in recent years. The World Bank has promoted this expansion on the basis of the private providers’ ability to ensure a rapid increase in enrolment, to improve quality through competition between institutions, and to secure benefits for society at little public cost. However, the charging of fees means that the majority of Brazilians do not have access, and that inequalities are reproduced due to the relation between course costs and the value of the final diploma. ...
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Accountability and the Pressure to Exclude: A Cautionary Tale from England
E. Rustique-Forrester
Recent studies have produced conflicting findings about whether test-based rewards and sanctions create incentives that improve student performance, or hurdles that increase dropout and pushout rates from schools. This article reports the findings from a study that examined the impact of England’s accountability reforms and investigated whether the confluent pressures associated with increased testing, school ranking systems, and other sanctions contributed to higher levels of student exclusion (expulsion and suspension). ...
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Progress of African Americans in Higher Education Attainment: The Widening Gender Gap and Its Current and Future Implications
Amadu J. Kaba
This research argues that despite all of the obstacles that African Americans have confronted in the history of the United States, they have made substantial progress in higher education attainment from the 1970s to the beginning of the 21st century. It reveals that the rise in attainment of college and university degrees has resulted in a substantial increase in living standards and that African Americans are making important economic, social and political contributions to the United States. I present several reasons why black males are not performing as well as black females in higher education attainment. Analyses are also presented regarding the current and future implications of the growing gap between black males and black females.
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The No Child Left Behind Act and the Legacy of Federal Aid to Education
Lee W. Anderson
The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) builds on a tradition of gradually increasing federal involvement in the nation’s public school systems. NCLB both resembles and differs from earlier federal education laws. Over the past five decades, conservatives in Congress softened their objections to the principle of federal aid to schools and liberals downplayed fears about the unintended consequences of increased federal involvement. The belief in limited federal involvement in education has been replaced by the presumption by many legislators that past federal investments justify imposing high stakes accountability requirements on schools.
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Using Pressure and Support to Create a Qualified Workforce
Sharon Ryan and Debra J. Ackerman
In order for any new initiative to be implemented, it is generally assumed that policy actors need both motivation to comply with a new initiative and adequate assistance to implement the required change successfully. The study reported here examined the impact of a system of pressure and supports created to encourage preschool teachers working in public school, Head Start, and child care settings to obtain a teaching credential by a court imposed deadline. ...
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Cambios y Conflictos en los Discursos Politico-pedagógicos sobre la Universidad
Luis Alberto Malagón Plata
This article considers multiple perspectives and notions about education that prevailed in the development of universities in Latin America. As complex institutions, universities have been developed following multiple models and through contradictory processes, maintaining ancient traditions and incorporating modern characteristics, to the extent that in contemporary universities it is possible to see the traces of previous models (medieval and modern universities). ...
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Texas Charter School Legislation and the Evolution of Open-Enrollment Charter Schools
Carrie Y. Barron, Edith J. Barrett, and Theresa Daniel
This article chronicles the evolution of legislation for Texas open-enrollment character schools to their implementation by demonstrating how these schools have (or have not) used their freedom from state-mandated requirements to develop innovative learning environments as well as to bring innovative curricula into the classroom. ...
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Workforce Quality Goals and the Implications for Education: The Oregon Experience
Nathan Sivers-Boyce, Tom Hibbard, and Jerry Gray
We review a plan that attracted the attention of public sector planners everywhere, Oregon’s 1989 Oregon Shines: An Economic Strategy for the Pacific Century. In particular, we focus on Oregon’s aspirations for world-class workforce quality; a status that the state’s planners argued would contribute to a host of other outcomes that foster citizen well-being. The broader purpose of the paper is to emphasize the importance of timing. ...
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Mandating Supplemental Intervention Services: Is New York State Doing Enough to Help All Students Succeed?
Kieran M. Killeen and John W. Sipple
As states have become more active in establishing curriculum content standards and related assessments disappointingly little attention has been paid to policy efforts that create learning opportunities for students to meet the new standards. This study examines one state policy designed to bolster the opportunity to learn by mandating additional instruction for students not currently achieving proficiency in the state standards. ...
