Politics and Systemic Education Reform

This brief describes political challenges to systemic reform and explores the condition under which coherent policy-making might occur

Challenges in Systemic Education Reform

Reform is generating a great deal of excitement and energy is associated with many positive classroom changes. But policymakers and educators are also facing a number of challenges in designing and implementing the new policies. This policy brief examines these challenges as well as strategies states are using to address them. It draws from CPRE\u27s studies of reform in 19 states and from discussions with staff of policymaker associations involved in providing assistance to states

The New Accountability

As part of standards-based reform, states and districts are designing new approaches to holding schools and districts accountable for discharging their missions. Virtually every state and thousands of districts are working on developing standards for student learning and aligning student assessments to those expectations. Most are taking the next step which is to use achievement of the standards as a basis for accountability. The new accountability approaches emerging from this work differ from more traditional systems with respect to one or more of seven factors. District/school approval is being linked to student performance rather than compliance to regulations; accountability is focusing more on schools as the unit of improvement; continuous improvement strategies involving school-level planning around specific performance targets are being adopted; new approaches to classroom inspection are being developed; more categories or levels of accreditation are being developed; school-level test scores are being publicly reported; and more consequences are being attached to performance levels. This policy brief reviews these developments and discusses issues arising from their design and implementation. It draws on several CPRE studies of accountability, most of which are still in progress. Therefore a number of the findings we cite, particularly about the effects of emerging accountability systems, are tentative. However, since policymakers are actively designing and modifying accountability policies, we believe that conveying currently available information about how they seem to be working, even if that information is preliminary, is worthwhile

Holding Schools Accountable: Is It Working?

The authors share findings from a body of research on emerging accountability systems conducted by the Consortium for Policy Research in Education

Hamilton Jacobi Bellman equations in infinite dimensions with quadratic and superquadratic Hamiltonian

We consider Hamilton Jacobi Bellman equations in an inifinite dimensional Hilbert space, with quadratic (respectively superquadratic) hamiltonian and with continuous (respectively lipschitz continuous) final conditions. This allows to study stochastic optimal control problems for suitable controlled Ornstein Uhlenbeck process with unbounded control processes

The District Role in Instructional Improvement

Are changing conditions affecting the capacity of districts to provide focus, to coordinate support, and to scale up successful reforms? From a study of the roles played by central office staff members in shaping and supporting instructional reforms in three large urban districts, the authors derive an answer

Representation of non-markovian optimal stopping problems by constrained BSDEs with a single jump

We consider a non-Markovian optimal stopping problem on finite horizon. We prove that the value process can be represented by means of a backward stochastic differential equation (BSDE), defined on an enlarged probability space, containing a stochastic integral having a one-jump point process as integrator and an (unknown) process with a sign constraint as integrand. This provides an alternative representation with respect to the classical one given by a reflected BSDE. The connection between the two BSDEs is also clarified. Finally, we prove that the value of the optimal stopping problem is the same as the value of an auxiliary optimization problem where the intensity of the point process is controlled