April 29, 2008 : Jay Greene and Marcus Winters, Manhattan Institute
This paper evaluates the impact of exposure to a voucher program for disabled students in Florida on the academic performance of disabled students who remain in the public school system. The authors utilize student-level data on the universe of public school students in the state of Florida from 2000-01 through 2004-05 to study the effect of the largest school voucher program in the United States, the McKay Scholarship Program for Students with Disabilities (McKay), on achievement in math and reading by students who have been diagnosed as disabled and remain in the public school system.
This paper is the first empirical evaluation of the impact of exposure to a voucher program designed to allow students with disabilities to enroll in schools other than their local public schools on the achievement of disabled students who remain in their local public schools. Vouchers for disabled students are the fastest-growing type in the United States. Programs similar to McKay are currently operating in Ohio, Georgia, and Utah and have been recently considered by other states.
Highlights of the study include:
~ Public school students with relatively mild disabilities made statistically significant test score improvements in both math and reading as more nearby private schools began participation in the McKay program. That is, contrary to the hypothesis that school choice harms students who remain in public schools, this study finds that students eligible for vouchers who remained in the public schools made greater academic improvements as their school choices increased.
~ Disabled public school students' largest gains as exposure to McKay increased were made by those diagnosed as having the mildest learning disabilities. The largest category of students enjoying the greatest gains, known as Specific Learning Disability, accounts for 61.2% of disabled students and 8.5% of all students in Florida.
~ The academic proficiency of students diagnosed with relatively severe disabilities was neither helped nor harmed by increased exposure to the McKay program. […]
February 28, 2008 : Spyros Konstantopoulos, Northwestern University
No more vexing problem in education exists today than the achievement gap in this country. The difference between the extremes has rightfully attracted national attention, and one of the most popular policy proposals is to reduce class size-not surprising, since benchmarks are easily measured. This provocative study explores the hard data and finds that some of our basic assumptions about class size may be incorrect.
Konstantopoulos worked with data on mathematics and reading achievement provided by Tennessee's Project STAR (Student/Teacher Achievement Ratio), an unprecedented four-year longitudinal class-size study encompassing over 11,000 K-3 students in 79 schools. The project found, not surprisingly, that smaller class size is a better situation for the children at all achievement levels, and previous analyses saw rising achievement on average. For most advocates, parents, and policy makers, this was enough. But when Konstantopoulos dug deeper, he found that the children who are already high achievers benefited the most from the extra attention afforded by smaller classes. Low achievers also benefited from being in small classes (compared to low achievers in regular size classes), but they did not benefit not as much as high achievers. Unfortunately, he also found that the smaller classes produced higher variability in achievement which indicates that the achievement gap between low and high achievers is larger in small classes than in regular size classes, especially in kindergarten and first grade. […]
January 29, 2008 : Thomas Toch and Robert Rothman, Education Sector
The troubled state of teacher evaluation is a glaring and largely neglected problem in public education, an enterprise that spends $400 billion annually on salaries and benefits.
Because teacher evaluation is at the heart of the educational enterprise - the quality of teaching in the nation's classrooms - it has the potential to be a powerful lever of teacher and school improvement. But that potential is being squandered throughout public education today.
A host of factors - a lack of accountability for school performance, staffing practices that strip school systems of incentives to take teacher evaluation seriously, union ambivalence, and public education's practice of using teacher credentials as a proxy for teacher quality - have resulted in teacher evaluation systems throughout public education that are superficial, capricious, and often don't even directly address the quality of instruction, much less measure students' learning.
In this Education Sector report, Co-founder and Co-director Thomas Toch and Robert Rothman of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform examine the causes and consequences of the crisis in teacher evaluation, as well as its implications for the current national debate about performance pay for teachers. And the report examines a number of national, state, and local evaluation systems that point to a way out of the evaluation morass. […]
January 15, 2008 : Paul T. Hill, University of Washington
In the past decade, controversies about public spending on education have grown as states adopted performance standards pledging that every child will learn enough to become an independent productive citizen and as No Child Let Behind has put teeth into those expectations. Educators say that meeting higher standards requires more money. Some policymakers claim that past spending increases were large enough to pay for higher performance if funds were used productively. While litigants have asked courts to determine what amount of spending is adequate to allow schools to meet standards and then to mandate commensurate spending increases, defendants in "adequacy" lawsuits have argued that greater expenditures alone will not lead to higher school performance.
Critics of demands for more money point to cases in New Jersey, Arkansas, and Kansas City where major spending increases were misspent, with little or no impact on student learning. Though no one seriously argues that more spending could never lead to school improvement, there is reason to fear that without changes in the way funds are spent, Americans could end up with a more expensive, but not necessarily more effective or equitable, system of public education.
In this environment, elected officials, especially governors and state legislators, have searched for answers to two questions: How much money will it take for all students to meet standards and how should the money be spent? The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation asked the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) to create a School Finance Redesign Project (SFRP) to help elected officials better understand how the finance system now works and to identify their options in allocating resources to support K-12 education. This Interim Report explains the questions posed, the research strategies employed, and the ways in which will results will be presented. It also previews some of the early findings. […]
December 7, 2007 : C. Kirabo Jackson, Cornell University
This study analyzes a program that was implemented in schools serving underprivileged populations in Texas that paid both students and teachers for passing grades on Advanced Placement (AP) examinations. Exploiting the fact that different schools adopted the program at different times, the study compares the changes in aggregate student outcomes, before and after adoption, for schools adopting the AP incentive program to the changes experienced over the same time period for carefully selected groups of comparison schools.
Adoption of the AP incentive program is associated with a 30% increase in the number of students scoring above 1100 on the SAT or 24 on the ACT, and an 8% increase in the number of students who matriculate in college in Texas. The per-student costs of the program are very small relative to reasonable estimates of the implied lifetime benefits that accrue to affected students such that the APIP may ameliorate sub-optimal educational investments. Empirical evidence suggests that teachers and students were not simply aiming to maximize their rewards. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the increases in AP participation were due to better access to AP courses, changes in teacher and peer norms towards AP courses, and better student information. […]
