Effective Schools: Managing the Recruitment, Development, and Retention of High-Quality Teachers

Analyzes the correlation between a school's effectiveness as measured by student achievement value-add and its ability to recruit, retain, and develop high-quality teachers and remove others, with a focus on the principal's leadership effectiveness

Hop on the Bus: Driving Stratification Concepts Home

The purpose of experiential education is to combine experience and learning in ways that transform both (Carver 1996; Giles and Eyler 1994; Kolb 1984). Students have experiences outside the classroom, and these experiences are integrated into the course curriculum, enriching both the experience and the class material. Successful experiential education assignments must first provide students with the background they need to fully take advantage of the experience as well as the time and knowledge to help them reflect on what they see (Hironimus Wendt and Lovell-Troy 1999; Hollis 2002; Mooney and Edwards 2001)

Effective Schools: Teacher Hiring, Assignment, Development, and Retention

The literature on effective schools emphasizes the importance of a quality teaching force in improving educational outcomes for students. In this paper, we use value-added methods to examine the relationship between a school’s effectiveness and the recruitment, assignment, development and retention of its teachers. We ask whether effective schools systematically recruit more effective teachers; whether they assign teachers to students more effectively; whether they do a better job of helping their teachers improve; whether they retain more effective teachers; or whether they do a combination of these processes. Our results reveal four key findings. First, we find that more effective schools are able to attract and hire more effective teachers from other schools when vacancies arise. Second, we find that more effective schools assign novice teachers to students in a more equitable fashion. Third, we find that teachers who work in schools that were more effective at raising achievement in a prior period improve more rapidly in a subsequent period than do those in less effective schools. Finally, we find that more effective schools are better able to retain higher-quality teachers, though they are not differentially able to remove ineffective teachers. The results point to the importance of personnel, and perhaps, school personnel practices, for improving student outcomes.

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The authors use administrative data from three large urban school districts to describe student sorting within schools. Students are linked to each of their teachers and students' classmates are identified. There are differences in the average achievement levels, racial composition, and socioeconomic composition of classrooms within schools. This sorting occurs even in self-contained elementary school classrooms and is much larger than would be expected were students assigned to classrooms randomly. Much of the racial and socioeconomic sorting is accounted for by differences in achievement, particularly at the high school level. Classrooms with the most low-achieving, minority, and poor students are more likely to have novice teachers. Sorting students by achievement level exposes minority and poor students to lower quality teachers and less resourced classmates

The Declining Use of Race in College Admissions Decisions

Using eighteen years of data from more than 1,300 four-year colleges and universities in the United States, we investigate the extent to which institutional characteristics and contextual factors influence the propensity of colleges to indicate that they consider race/ethnicity in their admissions decisions. Consideration of race/ethnicity in admissions declined sharply after the mid-1990s, especially at public institutions. Rather than being shaped by specific historical and political contexts, consideration of race/ethnicity in admissions appears to be a widely institutionalized practice in higher education that has been tempered by changes in the policy environment over time

Brown Fades The End of court-ordered school Desegregation and the Resegregation of American Public Schools

Abstract In this paper we investigate whether the school desegregation produced by courtordered desegregation plans persists when school districts are released from court oversight. Over 200 medium-sized and large districts were released from desegregation court orders from 1991 to 2009. We find that racial school segregation in these districts increased gradually following release from court order, relative to the trends in segregation in districts remaining under court order. These increases are more pronounced in the South, in elementary grades, and in districts where pre-release school segregation levels were low. These results suggest that court-ordered desegregation plans are effective in reducing racial school segregation, but that their effects fade over time in the absence of continued court oversight