School accountability and student performance

Education

Does School Accountability Lead to Improved Student Performance?

The leading school reform policy in the United States revolves around strong accountability of schools with consequences for performance. The federal government's involvement through the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 reinforces the prior movement of many states toward policies based on measured student achievement. Analysis of state achievement growth as measured by the National Assessment of Educational progress shows that accountability systems introduced during the 1990s had a clear positive impact on student achievement. This single policy instrument did not, however, also lead to any narrowing in the black-white achievement gap (though it did narrow the Hispanic-white achievement gap). Moreover, the balck-white gap appears to have been harmed over the decade by increasing minority concentrations in the schools. An additional issue surrounding stronger accountability has been a concern about unintended consequences related to such things as higher exclusion rates from testing, increased drop-out rates, and the like. Our analysis of special education placement rates, a frequently identified area of concern, does not show any responsiveness to the introduction of accountability systems.

Does Pollution Increase School Absences?

We examine the effect of air pollution on school absences using unique administrative data for elementary and middle school children in the 39 largest school districts in Texas. These data are merged with information from monitors maintained by the Environmental Protection Agency. To control for potentially confounding factors, we adopt a difference-in-difference-in differences strategy, and control for persistent characteristics of schools, years, and attendance periods in order to focus on variations in pollution within school-year-attendance period cells. We find that high levels of carbon monoxide (CO) significantly increase absences, even when they are below federal air quality standards.

A Quantitative Occam's Razor

This paper derives an objective Bayesian "prior" based on considerations of entropy/information. By this means, it produces a quantitative measure of goodness of fit (the "H-statistic") that balances higher likelihood against the number of fitting parameters employed. The method is intended for phenomenological applications where the underlying theory is uncertain or unknown. For example, it can help decide whether the large angle anomalies in the CMB data should be taken seriously. I am therefore posting it now, even though it was published before the arxiv existed.Comment: plainTeX, 16 pages, no figures. Most current version is available at http://www.physics.syr.edu/~sorkin/some.papers/ (or wherever my home-page may be

Equality of opportunity and educational achievement in Portugal

Portugal has one of the highest levels of income inequality in Europe, and low wages and unemployment are concentrated among low skill individuals. Education is an important determinant of inequality. However, there are large differences in the educational attainment of different individuals in the population, and the sources of these differences emerge early in the life-cycle when families play a central role in individual development. We estimate that most of the variance of school achievement at age 15 is explained by family characteristics. Observed school inputs explain very little of adolescent performance. Children from highly educated parents benefit of rich cultural environments in the home and become highly educated adults. Education policy needs to be innovative: (1) it needs to explicitly recognize the fundamental long run role of families on child development; (2) it needs to acknowledge the failure of traditional input based policies

The effect of school spending on student achievement: addressing biases in value-added models

The estimation of education production models used to evaluate the effect of school inputs and past skills on test scores, often called value-added models, can be biased by three main econometric issues: unobserved child characteristics, unobserved family and school characteristics and measurement error. We propose a two-step estimation technique which exploits the availability of test scores across time, subjects, families and schools in a unique administrative data set for England to correct for these potential biases. Our empirical results suggest that omitting school characteristics biases the estimation of the effect of school expenditure, whereas omitting unobserved child endowment biases the estimation of the effect of past skills but not the effect of school expenditure

School performance in Australia: is there a role for quasi-markets?

Recent changes to the organisation of Australia's education system have raised the possibility of implementing wide-ranging market reforms. In this article we discuss the scope for introducing reforms similar to the United Kingdom's 'quasi-market' model. We discuss the role of school league tables in providing signals and incentives in a quasi-market. Specifically, we compare a range of unadjusted and model-based league tables of primary school performance in Queensland's public education system. These comparisons indicate that model-based tables which account for socio-economic status and student intake quality vary significantly from the unadjusted tables

The magnitude of educational disadvantage amongst indigenous minority groups in Australia.

Indigenous groups are amongst the most disadvantaged minority groups in the developed world. This paper examines the educational disadvantage of indigenous Australians by assessing academic performance at a relatively early age. We find that, by the age of 10, indigenous Australians are substantially behind non-indigenous Australians in academic achievement. Their relative performance deteriorates further over the next 2 years. School and locality do not appear to be important determinants of the indigenous to non-indigenous achievement gap. However, geographic remoteness, indigenous ethnicity and language use at home have a marked influence on educational achievement. A current focus of Australian indigenous policy is to increase school resources. Our results suggest that this will not eliminate indigenous educational disadvantage on its own

Studying changes in the practice of two teachers developing assessment for learning

This paper describes changes in the practice of two teachers, observed over an eighteen month period, who were participating in a study intended to support teachers in developing their use of assessment in support of learning. The design of the intervention allowed each teacher to choose for themselves which aspects of their practice to develop. Analysis of lesson observations, journal entries and interviews indicate that both teachers were keen to change their practice, but were concerned about the disruption to their established routines, and in particular about the potential for loss of control of their classes. Both teachers did effect significant changes in their classrooms, but these tended to be developments of existing preferred ways of working, rather than radical innovations. In conclusion, it is suggested that to be most effective, teacher professional development needs to be structured strongly enough to afford teacher growth, but flexible enough to allow different teachers to take their practice in different ways