161 research outputs found
The impact of principal salary, district wealth, student socioeconomic status and school size on the achievement level of students in selected Mississippi public schools
Get PDFThe purpose of this study was to examine the impact of four variables, principal salary, district wealth, student socioeconomic status, and school size, on the achievement level of public school students in Mississippi. The first, principal salary, was found not to have been studied as a variable that may correlate with student achievement. One may have hypothesized that more effective principals would correlate with increased student achievement test scores and that those principals would have been rewarded with higher salaries. The results of this study did not support that idea. The data indicated that there was no meaningful correlation between highly paid principals and higher student achievement. There was no significant correlation between district wealth and student achievement. This may indicate that Mississippi school funding (MAEP) and federal funding have been effective in aiding low-wealth schools as was intended by lawmakers. There was a significant low positive correlation between school size and student achievement in non-urban elementary schools and a significant very low positive correlation with student achievement in high schools. That places this study in the minority camp of recent research in concluding that larger schools did not correlate with lower achievement. The most significant, meaningful, and important finding of this study was the dramatic impact that student poverty has on student achievement in Mississippi. In urban schools and rural schools, in elementary, middle, and high schools, poorer children scored poorly on their achievement tests. Correlations were significant moderate to high at all levels, with the highest at middle schools with a significant high negative correlation of -.636. The analysis indicates that a decrease in poverty will result in a dramatic increase in student achievement
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Parent involvement in a post Proposition 2-1/2 era : the effects of politics and education funding on parent involvement in an urban setting : a case study.
Get PDFParent involvement in political activities is a rare form of parent participation. Most parents who take an interest in schools become involved with their child\u27s classroom, attend school functions and activities, assist with fundraisers, attend PTA meetings. As the process for funding public school education has become more difficult and as decisions about education become more political, some parents have reacted to that trend and have become involved in the politics themselves. Changes in laws and education funding formulas in Massachusetts over the last decade has caused parents to become more protective, more vigilant of the school budget process, and of the way politicians position themselves on school issues. This is the case study of six parents who have been involved in schools and community politics over a decade in Millville, a community in western Massachusetts. The population of Millville is mainly elderly and White, while the school population is more than seventy percent minority, the majority of whom are Puerto Ricans. This has caused a clash of culture, age, and priorities. The schools have become a political battleground, and with parents no strangers to those battles as they fight to protect the rights of children to an equitable education. The involvement of these parents has been directly influenced by the enactment of a tax limitation proposal known as Proposition 2 1/2. A document review reveals the nature of the political climate of the Commonwealth during the last decade as it influenced local and state decision making about public schools and the funding of them. This study explores for what reasons parents participate in parent involvement through governance activities; how the climate of the last decade has influenced the types of activities in which parents engage; why parents make governance activities their priority; how their earlier experiences in parent involvement were similar to or different from the types of activities they find themselves engaged in now; how their earlier impressions of their involvement different from the current climate for parental involvement; and what types of parent involvement, given the current political climate of the Commonwealth, are most important now
The Deinstitutionalization of Juvenile Status Offenders: New Myths and Old Realities
Get PDFClaims are being made for deinstitutionalization that obscure some of the lesser known, negative effects. Within the juvenile justice system, for example, many juveniles who were previously institutionalized as juvenile status offenders are being relabelled and institutionalized as jivenile delinquents. In the state system studied in this report, the total number of juveniles in institutional programs did not decrease during the period of deinstitutionalization
Michigan’s quantitative school culture inventories and student achievement
Get PDFSchools must help all students achieve. Leaders who understand the elements of culture and their impact on an organization can be very effective. In 2015, as part of a strategy to cultivate healthy school cultures, the State of Michigan deployed a new self-reporting school culture inventory as part of each school\u27s annual reporting. In this quantitative study, correlational and comparative analyses were conducted to examine the relationship between schools’ self-reported school culture inventories (School Systems Review) and student achievement measured by the state’s reading assessment data (MStep). This study analyzed achievement data from students in Grades 3 through 5 during the 2014-2015 (N = 6758) and the 2015-2016 (N = 6947) school years. All schools (N=32) in the study were traditional public school districts located in the state of Michigan’s southeast counties of Macomb, Oakland, and Wayne. The findings of this study suggested that higher reported levels of school culture on the Michigan’s School System Review (SSR) were significantly correlated to higher levels of student achievement. Further, that higher reported levels of collaborative teams and collective responsibility, indicators of healthy school culture within a school, were significantly correlated to higher levels of academic achievement. Findings of this study offered evidence that school leaders in Michigan can utilize the SSR to analyze school culture, and moreover, school leaders everywhere should recognize the importance collaborative teams and collective responsibility in developing healthy school cultures
Political Symbolism in Juvenile Justice: Reforming Florida\u27s Juvenile Detention Criteria
Get PDFA recent reform in Florida\u27s juvenile detention criteria was over-turned during the subsequent legislative session. This paper describes both the initial reform and its reversal and suggests that symbolic political rewards may often be more important than the actual consequences of a policy. Recommendations are made for accomplishing policy reform in a traditional political culture
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