Making a Difference?: The Effects of Teach for America in High School

Uses longitudinal data from North Carolina to estimate the effectiveness, in terms of gains in student test scores, of TFA teachers relative to traditional teachers. Focuses on math and science teachers in the first study of TFA effects in high schools

Contracting as a Mechanism for Managing Education Services

Contracting with for-profit firms is one of the new organizational arrangements to emerge in public education in the nineties. Fueled by millions of new investment dollars and by demand for education management services from the burgeoning charter school movement, education contracting is growing. The Edison Project, for example, opened its first four schools in 1995 and now operates 77 schools serving approximately 37,000 students in twelve states. Contracting, like vouchers and charter schools, is a market-based reform presumed to promote improved performance through new accountability mechanisms and exploiting competition. School districts have long contracted for building maintenance, transportation, and food services. Districts have even contracted for educational services, but typically only for specialized services for a small number of children with handicaps or other special needs. What is happening now is different: school districts are contracting for regular educational services, the very services they are organized to provide. This issue of CPRE Policy Briefs describes key features of education services contracts between school districts and forprofit firms and discusses some management issues raised by these contracts. The information is based on the terms of 11 contracts and interviews with the officials who shaped these contracts. The contracts were intentionally selected to be diverse. They include contracts from 1990 to 1998 and contracts with school districts as well as with charter boards. One contract established external management control of an entire school district; other contracts focused on school-level management; while still others provided a limited set of educational services. A few of the contracts ended contentiously; others have been in force for some years without dispute. This Policy Brief does not evaluate particular contracts from an educational or legal perspective, but uses the set of contracts to analyze contracting as a management tool in education

Feeling the Florida Heat? How Low-Performing Schools Respond to Voucher and Accountability Pressure

While numerous recent authors have studied the effects of school accountability systems on student test performance and school "gaming" of accountability incentives, there has been little attention paid to substantive changes in instructional policies and practices resulting from school accountability. The lack of research is primarily due to the unavailability of appropriate data to carry out such an analysis. This paper brings to bear new evidence from a remarkable five-year survey conducted of a census of public schools in Florida, coupled with detailed administrative data on student performance. We show that schools facing accountability pressure changed their instructional practices in meaningful ways. In addition, we present medium-run evidence of the effects of school accountability on student test scores, and find that a significant portion of these test score gains can likely be attributed to the changes in school policies and practices that we uncover in our surveys.

Value Added of Teachers in High-Poverty Schools and Lower-Poverty Schools

This paper examines whether teachers in schools serving students from high-poverty backgrounds are as effective as teachers in schools with more advantaged students. The question is important. Teachers are recognized as the most important school factor affecting student achievement, and the achievement gap between disadvantaged students and their better off peers is large and persistent. Using student-level microdata from 2000-2001 to 2004-2005 from Florida and North Carolina, the authors compare the effectiveness of teachers in high-poverty elementary schools (>70% FRL students) with that of teachers in lower-poverty elementary schools

Managers managing: the workings of an administrative system

Symbole fort des retrouvailles paneuropéennes, c’est à Prague en juin 2004, que s’est tenue une conférence franco-allemande – rassemblant des chercheurs aussi bien français et allemands, qu’italiens, tchèques et polonais –, organisée par le CEFRES (Centre français de recherches en sciences sociales, Prague) et la DGAP (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Auswärtige Politik, Berlin), sur la « politique européenne de voisinage » de l’Union européenne. Le moment était historique : cela faisait à peine un ..

Putting Standards to the Test: A Design for Evaluating the Systemic Reform of Education

A silent revolution has transformed American education rivaling the Progressive movement of the late 19th and early 20th century. This new movement — which goes by the name of “systemic” or “standards-based” reform — now dominates education policy in nearly every state, and is the basis for essentially all federal policy-making targeted at K-12 schools. This is not to ignore other competing strategies for the reform of our schools, most notably the inclusion of market competition (e.g., charter schools, school choice, vouchers), but even when these options are implemented they are typically being implemented within the broader context of systemic school reform. The spark that ignited this revolution came not from national leadership but from the states, especially the highly influential report by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, The Nation at Risk (1983), which galvanized the education community around the goal of combating the “rising tide of mediocrity” that was purported to be destroying our schools and placing our children at risk of falling behind in the global marketplace. But even before the publication of this landmark report, a number of governors, especially those in the South, had placed education high on their political agenda based on a realization that without efforts to upgrade the skills of their state’s children they would not be able to sustain economic growth in the new information-driven post-industrial economy