Education Policy Analysis Archives (EPAA)
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Predicting Higher Education Graduation Rates from Institutional Characteristics and Resource Allocation
Florence A. Hamrick, John H. Schuh, and Mack C. Shelley II
This study incorporated institutional characteristics (e.g., Carnegie type, selectivity) and resource allocations (e.g., instructional expenditures, student affairs expenditures) into a statistical model to predict undergraduate graduation rates. Instructional expenditures, library expenditures, and a number of institutional classification variables were significant predictors of graduation rates. ...
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What Predicts the Mobility of Elementary School Leaders? An Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Colorado
Motoko Akiba and Robert Reichardt
While many studies have reported the predictors of teacher attrition, we know little about what predicts the attrition of school leaders. Using the Colorado state data on elementary school principals’ and assistant principals’ career paths from 1999 to 2001 and school achievement-level data, we addressed two research questions: 1) How do the age-specific attrition rates differ by gender and race? and 2) What other conditional factors are associated with the attrition of school leaders?
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Policy Issues for Australia's Education Systems: Evidence from International and Australian Research
Gary N. Marks, Julie McMillan, and John Ainley
Our purpose here is to discuss education policy issues in the context of empirical evidence. We note that many commonly held beliefs about Australian education such as, the relative performance and participation levels of Australian students; the importance of socioeconomic background on educational outcomes both relative to other countries and changes over-time; gender differences in mathematics and science; and the labor market situation of early school leavers; are not supported by empirical research.
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Education and Alternate Assessment for Students with Significant Cognitive Disabilities: Implications for Educators
Mary C. Zatta and Diana C. Pullin
… This paper describes some of the ways in which alternate assessment as part of standards-based education reform may impact students with significant cognitive disabilities. It provides an overview of state efforts to implement alternate assessments for students with significant cognitive disabilities, followed by an example of how one state has begun to implement alternate assessment through the Massachusetts Alternate Assessment (MCAS-Alt/Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System Alternate).
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Educación, Cooperación y Desarrollo: La Situación Latinoamericana a Comienzos del Siglo XXI
Isabela Neira Gómez and Marta Portela Maseda
In this article, we analyze the basic educational needs of the countries of Latin America, the education policies that are evolving within the region, and the policies that are proposed by the developed countries to meet these needs in the future. ...
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Reform Ideals and Teachers' Practical Intentions
Mary M. Kennedy
Reformers have been trying for decades to alter the fundamental character of classroom instruction in the United States, but have repeatedly been unsuccessful in fostering significant change in teaching practice. Several hypotheses have been put forward to account for this problem–that teachers lack sufficient knowledge (hence we need more professional development), that they lack sufficient will (hence we need accountability systems) or that they disagree with reform ideals or find other agendas to be more compelling in their classrooms. ...
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How Feasible is Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP)? Simulations of School AYP "Uniform Averaging" and "Safe Harbor" under the No Child Left Behind Act
Jaekyung Lee
... Through simulation analyses of Maine and Kentucky school performance data collected during the 1990s, this study investigates how feasible schools would have met the AYP targets if the mandate had been applied in the past with “uniform averaging (rolling averages)” and “safe harbor” options that have potential to help reduce the number of schools needing improvement or corrective action. ...
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The Achievement Gap: Should We Rely on SAT Scores to Tell Us Anything About It?
Dale Whittington
Increasing numbers of students taking the SAT have declined to identify their race/ethnicity. I examined the impact of non-respondents on the validity of reported racial/ethnic differences and year-to-year changes in test performance. ...
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Public Policy and the Shaping of Disability: Incidence Growth in Educational Autism
Dana Lee Baker
… In this article, shift-share analysis is used to gain insight into how the growth in autism incidence is being differentially experienced and recorded within a single arena of policy across the United States. ...
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Increasing Equity and Increasing School Performance - Conflicting or Compatible Goals?: Addressing the Issues in Williams v. State of California
Jeanne M. Powers
This work addresses some of the arguments regarding equity in public education versus school performance at issue in the case of Williams v. State of California. …
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La Reacción de los Profesores a las Evaluaciones Externas de los Establecimientos Escolares: La Proposición de un Modelo
Diego Durán
… This article will discuss how the goal of regulating the system has not always been achieved. On the contrary, most of the time, one can discern an increasing resistance among the main actors of the system (especially teachers) toward the politics of regulating schools through the use of assessment instruments. I present a model that allows a closer view of this conflict based on teachers' perceptions of these assessments and the educational project of their schools.
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Calculation of the Cost of an Adequate Education in Kentucky: A Professional Judgment Approach
Deborah A. Verstegen
… This research is designed to calculate the cost of an adequate education by aligning resources to State standards, laws and objectives, using a professional judgment approach. ...
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Comparison of Academic Development in Catholic versus Non-Catholic Private Secondary Schools
Mikyong Minsun Kim and Margaret Placier
Utilizing hierarchical linear models, this study of 144 private schools (72 Catholic and 72 non-Catholic schools) drawn from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 discovered that Catholic school students scored lower in reading than students at non-Catholic private schools.
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Prebendarismo Y Faccionalismo En La Institucionlización Del Conocimiento: El caso de la Investigación y la Docencia Argentinas (1989-2003)
Eduardo R. Saguier
The study of the centralizing mechanisms of academic power that very often work to obstruct and boycott individual and collective demands to produce critical knowledge, as well as impose circuits or networks made of multiple and combined knots (clientelism, nepotism, careerism and ethnocentric, sectarian and nepotic reciprocities), must necessarily go to their historical origins, analyzing several phenomena such as the coloniality of power, the subordination to a geopolitical and socio-technological stratification of knowledge, the fragmentation of knowledge processes, and other phenomena like endogamy, sectarianism, corruption and social, economic and political crises. ...
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Group and Interaction Effects with "No Child Left Behind": Gender and Reading in a Poor, Appalachian District
Robert Bickel and A. Stan Maynard
Critics of “No Child Left Behind” judge that it oversimplifies the influence of social context and the place of socially ascribed traits, such as social class, race, and gender, in determining achievement. We hold that this is especially likely to be true with regard to gender-related group effects and gender-implicated interaction effects. ...
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Below the Accountability Radar Screen: What does State Policy Say about School Counseling?
Angela M. Eilers
I examine the state policy context of implementing an initiative that transforms the training and role of today’s school counselors. ...
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A Privatização De Direitos Nos Anos Noventa: O Papel Político Da Municipalização Educacional
João dos Reis Silva Júnior
The goal of this short essay is to study the reforms and political role of the Brazilian process of educational municipalization as well as to analyze some of the changes developed in the space of civil society. To do so, this study analyzes the main documents which oriented and were produced for the reform.
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Reconsidering the Impact of High-Stakes Testing
Henry Braun
… In this article, I undertake an extended reanalysis of one component of Amrein and Berliner (2002a). We focus on the performance of states, over the period 1992 to 2000, on the NAEP mathematics assessments for grades 4 and 8. In particular, we compare the performance of the high-stakes testing states, as designated by Amrein and Berliner, with the performance of the remaining states (conditioning, of course, on a state’s participation in the relevant NAEP assessments). ...
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Educational Policy Reform and Its Impact on Equity Work in Ontario: Global Challenges and Local Possibilities
Goli M. Rezai-Rashti
In this article I discuss the effects of global policy discourses on the educational restructuring of the work of equity workers in Ontario, Canada. ...
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An Exploration of the Pay Levels Needed to Attract Students with Mathematics, Science and Technology Skills to a Career in K-12 Teaching
Anthony Milanowski
In an exploratory study of the role of salary level and other factors in motivating undergraduate math, science, and technology majors to consider a career as a K-12 teacher, the salary level students said would motivate them to consider a career in teaching was related to the salary expected in their chosen non-teaching occupation, but not to three of the Big 5 personality dimensions of extroversion, agreeableness, and openness, nor concern for others or career risk aversion. ...
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La Segregación Étnica En Contexto: El Caso De La Educación En Vallecas—Puente De Vallecas
David Poveda
This article presents an ethnographic analysis of the social conditions and ideological processes that help understand how students are distributed unequally between private and public schools on the basis of their ethnicity. To do so, it examines the form these mechanisms adopt in a particular area of Madrid (Spain): Vallecas-Puente de Vallecas. This part of the city has undergone dramatic social changes during the last fifty years and has a very intense social history in Madrid. Currently, it shows a high degree of ethnic segregation between schools depending on their status (public vs. ‘private-concerted’). ...
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Basic Education in Cambodia: The Impact of UNESCO on Policies in the 1990s
Sideth S. Dy and Akira Ninomiya
… This article examines the joint efforts during the 1990s of this organization as a key assistance and support UN agency for educational policy and strategy formulations, an the Cambodian government as a national agency for educational initiatives and implementation. UNESCO’s inputs for policy implementation are also detailed to evaluate the overall impact of the organization during the last decade. ...
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University Strategic Planning in Cameroon: What Lessons for Sub-Saharan Africa?
Terfot Augustine Ngwana
This article argues that the global, regional, and local realities can complement rather than contradict each other in the process of strategic planning for universities in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Using the case of the University of Buea in Cameroon, it attempts to use the global trends of polarisation in knowledge production capacity as an input or tool for identifying strategic choice in the process of strategic planning in institutions. The national policy background is used to highlight the context and inherent role of the central government in the process of institutional strategic planning.
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Las Tecnologías de la Información y la Comunicación y los Indicadores de Evaluación Universitaria en España
Antonio Cardona Rodríguez and Miren Barrenetzea Ayesta
All institutions proclaim the importance of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in education, but is this taken into account when evaluating universities? Is it included in the evaluation indicators? In Spain, as in other neighboring countries, universities are immersed in a process of institutional evaluation. The indicator catalog is a fundamental part of the evaluation process. In this paper we make a brief analysis of the catalog of indicators proposed by the University Coordination Council in relation to its ability to measure the incorporation of ICT in universities.
