Education Policy Analysis Archives (EPAA)
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Portfolios, the Pied Piper of Teacher Certification Assessments: Legal and Psychometric Issues
Judy R. Wilkerson and William Steve Lang
Since about 90% of schools, colleges, and departments of education are currently using portfolios of one form or another as decision-making tools for standards-based decisions regarding certification or licensure (as well as NCATE accreditation), it is appropriate to explore the legal and psychometric aspects of this assessment device. The authors demonstrate that portfolios being used in a high-stakes context are technically testing devices and therefore need to meet psychometric standards of validity, reliability, fairness, and absence of bias. ...
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La Evaluación Ausente
Pablo E. Balonga
Absent elements in the evaluation processes of science and technology activities in Buenos Aires University are discussed. The main deficiencies identified are shown to be linked to the organization of the technological scientific system and to inherent conceptions of the scientists. Remedies are analyzed.
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Teachers Voices Interpreting Standards: Compromising Teachers Autonomy or Raising Expectations and Performances?
Leo C. Rigsby and Elizabeth K. DeMulder
The State of Virginia has adopted state-mandated testing that aims to raise the standards of performance for children in our schools in a manner that assigns accountability to schools and to teachers. In this paper we argue that the conditions under which the standards were created and the testing implemented undermine the professionalism of teachers. ...
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A Contabilidade Pública e o Sector da Educação em Portugal: do pressuposto legal à economia, eficiência e eficácia
J. J. Marques de Almeida and Maria da Conceição da Costa Marques
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The Effects of Full and Alternative Day Block Scheduling on Language Arts and Science Achievement in a Junior High School
Chance W. Lewis, R. Brian Cobb, Marc Winokur, Nancy Leech, and Michael Viney
The effects of a full (4 X 4) block scheduling program and an alternate day (AB) block scheduling program in a junior high school were under investigation in this study through the use of an ex post facto, matched sampling design. Measures investigated were standardized achievement tests in science and language arts. ...
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The Relationship between Exposure to Class Size Reduction and Student Achievement in California
Brian M. Stecher, Daniel F. McCaffrey, and Delia Bugliari
The CSR Research Consortium has been evaluating the implementation of the Class Size Reduction initiative in California since 1998. Initial reports documented the implementation of the program and its impact on the teacher workforce, the teaching of mathematics and Language Arts, parental involvement and student achievement. This study examines the relationship between student achievement and the number of years students have been exposed to CSR in grades K-3. ...
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Baselines for Assessment of Choice Programs
Paul T. Hill and Kacey Guin
Critics of choice argue that it will allow alert and aggressive parents to get the best of everything for their children, leaving poor and minority children concentrated in the worst schools. But choice is not the only mechanism whereby this occurs. Alert and aggressive parents work the bureaucracy to get the best for their children. Thus, choice programs should be compared against the real performance of the current public education system, not its idealized aspirations.
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The Allures and Illusions of Modernity: Technology and Educational Reform in Egypt
Mark Warschauer
Much of the research to date on educational technology has focused on its implementation in wealthy countries. Yet instructional technology has a special allure in the developing world, where it holds the promise not just of improving schools but also of hastening modernization. This article examines a national educational technology effort in Egypt, illuminating the contradictions between the rhetoric of reform and the reality of school practices. The analysis points to underlying political, cultural, and economic factors that constrain attempts to improve Egyptian schooling with technology.
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Systems of Practice: How Leaders Use Artifacts to Create Professional Community in Schools
Richard R. Halverson
This article explores how local school leaders construct the conditions for professional community in their schools. This paper argues that professional community is a special form of social capital that results, in part, from the design and implementation of facilitating structural networks by instructional leaders in schools. The structural aspects of a school community can be conceived as a system of practice, that is, a network of structures, tasks and traditions that create and facilitate complex webs of practice in organizations.
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English Learners in California Schools: Unequal Resources, Unequal Outcomes
Patricia Gándara, Russell Rumberger, Julie Maxwell-Jolly, and Rebecca Callahan
The Williams vs the State of California class action suit on behalf of poor children in that state argues that California provides a fundamentally inequitable education to students based on wealth and language status. This article, an earlier version of which was prepared as background to that case, reviews the conditions of schooling for English learners in the state with the largest population of such students, totaling nearly 1.6 million in 2003, and comprising about 40 percent of nation’s English learners. ...
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Communities of Practice and the Mediation of Teachers’ Responses to Standards-based Reform
Chrysan Gallucci
This paper evaluates the usefulness of a sociocultural approach for analyzing teachers’ responses to the professional learning demands of standards-based reform policies. A policy-oriented case study of the practice of six elementary teachers who worked in two high poverty schools in a demographically changing district in the state of Washington is summarized.
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Constraining Elementary Teachers' Work: Dilemmas and Paradoxes Created by State Mandated Testing
Sandra Mathison and Melissa Freeman
There are frequent reports of the challenges to teacher professionalism associated with high stakes and mandated testing (McNeil, 2000). So, we were not surprised in this year-long study of two elementary schools in upstate New York to hear teachers talk about the many ways the 4th grade tests in English Language Arts, Mathematics and Science undermine their ability to do their jobs with integrity. ...
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Wanted: A National Teacher Supply Policy for Education: The Right Way to Meet The "Highly Qualified Teacher" Challenge
Linda Darling-Hammond and Gary Sykes
… We argue that teacher supply policy should attract well-prepared teachers to districts that sorely need them while relieving shortages in fields like special education, math and the physical sciences. We study the mal-distribution of teachers and examine its causes. We describe examples of both states and local school districts that have fashioned successful strategies for strengthening their teaching forces. ...
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Charter Schools and Race: A Lost Opportunity for Integrated Education
Erica Frankenberg and Chungmei Lee
Segregation patterns in the nation's charter schools are studied. After reviewing state charter legislation that directly addresses issues of racial and ethnic balance of student enrollment, we briefly examine the racial composition and segregation of the charter school population nationally. School-level analyses, aggregated by state constitute the primary method of studying segregation in charter schools. ...
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Performance Standards: Utility for Different Uses of Assessments
Robert L. Linn
Performance standards are arguably one of the most controversial topics in educational measurement. There are uses of assessments such as licensure and certification where performance standards are essential. There are many other uses, however, where performance standards have been mandated or become the preferred method of reporting assessment results where the standards are not essential to the use. ...
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Embracing Pedagogical Pluralism: An Educator's Case for (at Least Public) School Choice
David J. Ferrero
… Three objections to a conception of school choice grounded in a notion of reasonable pluralism among educational doctrines are addressed: 1) that it would undermine educators' efforts to secure status for themselves as professionals by admitting that “best practices” in education offer rough guidance at best; 2) that it would leave parents and students vulnerable to quackery; 3) that it abandons the common school tradition and its aspirations. ...
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Comments on Weiner, Resnick and Scientific Debate
Jonathan Goodman
Lois Weiner (2003) and Lauren Resnick (2003) have advanced substantially different views of the success of the reforms undertaken by Community School District Two (CSD2) in New York city. Weiner's position vis a vis District Two has probably conferred a greater measure of objectivity to her views. Criticisms of scholarly work, even when sharply worded, are neither personal nor unscientific; indeed they are quite common in all the sciences.
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Reforms, Research and Variability: A Reply to Lois Weiner
Laurence B. Resnick
Lois Weiner (2003) argues that the research reports from High Performance Learning Communities (HPLC) were biased because of the close working relationships between the researchers and the leaders of the Community School District Two (CSD2) reform. Contrary to any claims otherwise, this relationship was quite open and acknowledged. The intent of the HPLC investigation was always to link scholars and practitioners in a new form of research and development in which scholars became problem-solving partners with practitioners. ...
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Research or "Cheerleading"? Scholarship on Community School District 2, New York City
Lois Weiner
This article examines data on student achievement and school demographics not explored by the researchers who have promoted Community School District 2 (CSD 2) as a model of urban school reform that should be replicated elsewhere. Data on achievement indicate a remarkable degree of social and racial stratification among CSD 2's schools and levels of achievement that closely correlate with race, ethnicity, and poverty. In addition, when CSD 2's scores on state and city tests of mathematics are compared with results from CSD 25 in Queens, a school district that serves a population demographically similar, the superiority of its functioning becomes questionable.
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The Role of Theory and Policy in the Educational Treatment of Language Minority Students: Competitive Structures in California
Tom T. Stritikus and Eugene Garcia
… In this article, we examine the theoretical and policy-based positions currently competing to shape the nature of educational practice for language minority students. We highlight the salient theoretical differences between additive and subtractive conceptions for the education of language minority students and their policy- and practice-based implications. ...
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Re-analysis of NAEP Math and Reading Scores in States with and without High-stakes Tests: Response to Rosenshine
Audrey Amrein-Beardsley and David C. Berliner
Here we address the criticism of our NAEP analyses by Rosenshine (2003). On the basis of his thoughtful critique we redid some of the analyses on which he focused. Our findings contradict his. This is no fault of his, the reasons for which are explained in this paper. Our findings do support our position that high-stakes tests do not do much to improve academic achievement. ...
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High-Stakes Testing: Another Analysis
Barak Rosenshine
Amrein and Berliner (2002b) compared National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results in high-stakes states against the national average for NAEP scores. They studied NAEP scores for 8th grade mathematics, 4th grade mathematics, and 4th grade reading. They concluded that states that introduced consequences (high-stakes) to their statewide tests did not show any particular gains in their statewide NAEP scores. However, there was no comparison group in their analysis. In this analysis, a comparison group was formed from states that did not attach consequences to their state-wide tests. ...
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A National Crisis or Localized Problems? Getting Perspective on the Scope and Scale of the Teacher Shortage
Patrick Murphy, Michael DeArmond, and Kacey Guin
Despite the considerable attention the popular press has devoted to the question of teacher shortages, there have been surprisingly few attempts to systematically measure the size and nature of the problem. This article attempts to estimate the size and nature of the celebrated teacher shortage of the late 1990s by using data from the U.S. Department of Education’s 1999-00 School and Staffing Survey. ...
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Local Impact of State Testing in Southwest Washington
Linda Mabry, Jayne Poole, Linda Redmond, and Angelia Schultz
A decade after implementation of a state testing and accountability mandate, teachers' practices and perspectives regarding their classroom assessments and their state's assessments of student achievement were documented in a study of 31 teachers in southwest Washington state. Against a background of national trends and standards of psychometric quality, the data were analyzed for teachers' beliefs and practices regarding classroom assessment and also regarding state assessment, commonalities and differences among teachers who taught at grade levels tested by the state and those who did not, teachers' views about the impact of state assessment on their students and their classrooms, and their views about whether state testing promoted educational improvement or reform as intended. ...
