Organizing Schools to Improve Student Achievement: Start Times, Grade Configurations, and Teacher Assignments

Education reform proposals are often based on high-profile or dramatic policy changes, many of which are expensive, politically controversial, or both. In this paper, we argue that the debates over these "flashy" policies have obscured a potentially important direction for raising student performance -- namely, reforms to the management or organization of schools. By making sure the "trains run on time" and focusing on the day-to-day decisions involved in managing the instructional process, school and district administrators may be able to substantially increase student learning at modest cost.In this paper, we describe three organizational reforms that recent evidence suggests have the potential to increase K -- 12 student performance at modest costs: (1) Starting school later in the day for middle and high school students; (2) Shifting from a system with separate elementary and middle schools to one with schools that serve students in kindergarten through grade eight; (3) Managing teacher assignments with an eye toward maximizing student achievement (e.g. allowing teachers to gain experience by teaching the same grade level for multiple years or having teachers specializing in the subject where they appear most effective). We conservatively estimate that the ratio of benefits to costs is 9 to 1 for later school start times and 40 to 1 for middle school reform. A precise benefit-cost calculation is not feasible for the set of teacher assignment reforms we describe, but we argue that the cost of such proposals is likely to be quite small relative to the benefits for students. While we recognize that these specific reforms may not be appropriate or feasible for every district, we encourage school, district, and state education leaders to make the management, organization, and operation of schools a more prominent part of the conversation on how to raise student achievement

A Cost Assessment of the Dayton Public Schools Vehicle Routing Problem

The routing and scheduling problem involves both constructing efficient routes to deliver goods or services to and from customers from a single depot or set of depots, as well as scheduling particular vehicles to these routes such that customers receive their goods within a specified time window. There have been several different methods developed to reduce the costs incurred in transporting goods or services (i.e. students) to customers (i.e. schools). This problem may be used to model many circumstances in logistics and public transportation. Several school districts do not utilize operations research techniques to minimize, as much as possible, the costs associated with the operation of its pupil transportation system. In contrast, Dayton Public Schools (DPS) employs the optimization software package VersaTrans to minimize its transportation expenses. However, due to the importance it has placed on customer satisfaction, DPS has ultimately been reduced to door-to-door pickups. This, combined with an open enrollment policy and higher fuel prices, has resulted in an explosion of transportation related costs. Though DPS has made many great strides to gain control of its spending, due primarily to better management, there is still much to accomplish. This thesis seeks to utilize the VersaTrans routing software available to the Dayton Public School district to construct efficient routes that are feasible under a consolidated bell schedule so that both bus usage and route times are minimized

The New Hampshire, Vol. 67, No. 17 (Nov. 9, 1976)

An independent student produced newspaper from the University of New Hampshire