Implementing Value-Added Models of School Assessment

This paper considers value-added models of school assessment and their implementation in Poland. Value-added estimates can be very helpful for schools and policy makers who need a reliable way to control teaching effectiveness, or for parents who need information about school quality in their area. However, their usefulness depends on several statistical issues and specific decisions made during implementation. The paper discusses several value-added models and describes details of the solution implemented in Poland. Statistical problems are discussed according to their policy relevance. It is shown that what bothers statisticians is less important in practice than several problems encountered when one wants to apply these models to a policy relevant context. Problems of proper regression specification, omitted variables bias, and measurement error are discussed, but the ways value-added estimates could be published and used as policy evaluation tools are also presented. All this problems are discussed from a practical point of view using three years of experience in implementation of these methods in Poland.education, school assessment, school effectiveness, value-added models

What works for disadvantaged unemployed : private or public ALMP services? Evidence from Poland

Purpose: This paper aims to assess the effectiveness of public vs. private active labour market policies (ALMP) for disadvantaged unemployed. The literature on the efficiency of contracting-out ALMP services by public institutions is not consistent. Formalism and limited scope of possible actions in public institutions stand in the way to activation of the less promising unemployed. On the other hand, contracted-out companies work as a black-box and are paid a success fee. Design/Methodology/Approach: We used (conducted by accident) Randomised Control Trial evaluation of the contracting-out ALMP services program in Poland. We used public registers data from Poland. Findings: We found a strong positive effect of support provided by contracted private agencies. This effect was found to be the strongest among the most dismissed groups of the unemployed. Practical Implications: Study shows that success-fee for external institutions and lack of hard frames assures incentives compatibility that results in real improvement of the unemployed situation, even a year after the end of the intervention. This conclusion should result in adjustments in active labour market policy. Originality/Value: The uniqueness of the study lies in scale of the RCT experiment and robustness of conculusons. The golden standard of evaluation allowed for gaining indisputable evidence on the effectiveness of particular ALMP instrument. Without this kind of analysis, public decisions can turn out to be wrong and lead to the closure of effective programmes (as it happened with contracting-out ALMP services), and investment in programmes that do not provide any effective support for those in need.peer-reviewe

Returns from Income Strategies in Rural Poland

In order to stabilize and improve their income situation, rural households are strongly encouraged to diversify their activities both in and outside the agricultural sector. Most often, however, this phenomenon takes on only moderate proportions. This paper addresses issues of rural households’ income diversification in the case of Poland. It investigates returns from rural households’ income strategies using propensity score matching methods and extensive datasets spanning 1998-2008. Results suggest that returns from combining farm and off-farm activities were lower than returns from specialization, namely, concentrating on farming or on off-farm activities. Generally, farming seems to be the most attractive option for rural households and income difference between farmers and those who combine farming and off-farm activities increased after Poland joined the EU.Income diversification, rural areas, propensity score matching, Poland, Community/Rural/Urban Development, D31, O15, Q12,

Immigrant background and expected early school leaving in Europe: evidence from PISA

This technical brief analyses the relationship between immigrant status and educational expectations in PISA. Migration flows from outside and within the EU have increased in recent years, and this has raised the attention of policy makers and the general public, with special interests on the implications that those flows can have on, among other, the education system and the labour markets. At the same time, the EU has set the Europe 2020 headline target of reducing the share of early school leavers to 10 % within the EU. Early school leavers become generally disadvantaged socially and economically in later stages in life, so that it is important to better understand the motivations for leaving school and provide adequate policy solutions. The European Commission (2016, p. 3) indicates that early school leavers are more likely to come from immigrant student groups, as their “early school leaving rates are nearly twice as high as for the native population”. Yet it also emphasises that there is still a lack of evidence pointing to the underlying reasons. In particular, it is not clear whether, among early school leavers, immigrants students are more frequent due to specific reasons related to the status of immigrants or whether they are more frequent because immigrant students are more likely to possess the set of characteristics that are normally associated to early school leaving behaviour (such as belonging to low socio economic status). This study analyses the factors that are most strongly related to the probability to leave school early, putting special attention to immigrant status (by differentiating among first and second generation immigrants and, where possible, among EU and non-EU immigrants). To this end, we use OECD’s PISA data, which are the most widely employed data on international student assessment. Since early school leavers cannot directly be considered with these data, we focus on educational expectations, including the expectation to dropout early from school. As the related literature emphasises, these expectations are very closely linked to actually realised educational career patterns. Therefore, we can use expectations to gain insights on the factors influencing early school leaving. In addition, we also employ data from Eurostat to complement the picture on early school leavers and immigrants. First, we provide a range of descriptive data on immigrants and expected early school leavers. Second, we run a number of two-level logit regression models, including a range of student- and school-level variables. In particular, we consider all (available) EU Member States together, before providing results for each MS individually. Finally, we also distinguish more specifically between EU and non-EU immigrants in our regression models. The results show that, when controlling for individual and school characteristics, immigrant students do not structurally differ in their expected early dropout probability from natives across Europe. In other words, the reasons why students expect to leave school early are the same for both immigrant students and natives. This finding implies that it is more important to focus on the common factors that are associated with expected early school leaving. In particular, our results suggest that these are, at the students’ level, the socio-economic background of students, their epistemological beliefs and grade repetition, while, at the school level, the most consistent factor is the school’s mean expected early school leavers rate. The school-environment thus appears to play a key role in shaping educational expectations. Among the student-related factors, grade repetition is the most amenable by policy, so that grade repetition practices may be reconsidered by national policy makers.JRC.B.4-Human Capital and Employmen

Measuring progress in reading achievement between primary and secondary school across countries

This paper discusses a method to compare progress in reading achievement from primary to secondary school across countries. The method is similar to value-added models that take into account intake levels when comparing student progress in different schools. Value-added models are preferred over raw scores as they better reflect school efforts. The method discussed in this paper uses measures of achievement in primary schools from PIRLS and compares them to secondary school results from PISA. Changes in achievement are estimated using IRT models and random draws of test items. Results describe an interval in which estimates of progress can lie, depending on the comparability of these two assessments. Estimates of progress are also adjusted for student age, gender and other characteristics that differ between countries and surveys. Separate results by gender, immigrant status, and proficiency level provide a detailed picture of how students in different countries progress in school from the age of 10 to 15.human capital, cognitive skills, international student achievement tests, education, PISA, PIRLS

The impact of the 1999 education reform in Poland

Increasing the share of vocational secondary schooling has been a mainstay of development policy for decades, perhaps nowhere more so than in formerly socialist countries. The transition, however, led to significant restructuring of school systems, including a declining share of vocational students. Exposing more students to a general curriculum could improve academic abilities. This paper analyzes Poland’s significant improvement in international achievement tests and the restructuring of the education system that expanded general schooling to test the hypothesis that delayed vocational streaming improves outcomes. Using propensity score matching and differences-in-differences estimates, the authors show that delayed vocationalization had a positive and significant impact on student performance on the order of one standard deviation.Tertiary Education,Secondary Education,Education For All,Primary Education,Teaching and Learning