Once & For All: Placing a Highly Qualified Teacher in Every Philadelphia Classroom

Quality teaching matters - particularly for low-income, inner-city students who perform below grade level. But these students are often taught by the least-qualified and least-experienced teachers. Philadelphia schools will not be able to improve student performance dramatically without more teachers who have the skills, experience, and rich content knowledge needed to help every student achieve high standards.Once & For All: Placing a Highly Qualified Teacher in Every Philadelphia Classroom examines the current status of teacher quality in the city and what the School District of Philadelphia is now doing to ensure that all classrooms have highly trained, motivated, and knowledgeable teachers ready to boost the achievement of the district's 188,000 students.For the first time, thanks to information provided by the School District of Philadelphia, researchers have been able to identify what we know about the qualifications, experience, and school assignment patterns of Philadelphia's 11,700-member teaching force. The study was conducted by a group of scholars who have launched Learning from Philadelphia's School Reform, a three-year research project designed to measure and help the public understand the impact of the 2001 state takeover of the Philadelphia schools, the school management partnerships undertaken with external for-profit and non-profit organizations, and the reforms initiated by the state and city-appointed School Reform Commission (SRC) members and School District of Philadelphia CEO Paul Vallas.Led by Research for Action (RFA), a Philadelphia non-profit, the research team includes investigators from the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education and the Wharton School, the Philadelphia Education Fund, Swarthmore College, Rutgers University, the Consortium on Chicago School Research, and other organization

Closing the Teacher Quality Gap in Philadelphia: New Hope and Old Hurdles

This study of teacher staffing issues in the School District of Philadelphia, the third in a series, outlines the degree to which the district has succeeded in upgrading teachers' professional credentials, recruiting and retaining them, and equitably distributing experienced and credentialed teachers across all types of schools. Since the passage of NCLB and the state's takeover of the district in 2001, the district has succeeded in improving the certification rates of its teachers, especially new teachers, and in drastically cutting the number of emergency-certified teachers and classroom vacancies. It has also improved new teacher retention and has modernized and decentralized its hiring process. At the same time, it has not been able to change the pattern of having the least qualified teachers in schools serving the highest percentages of poor and minority students nor its poor long-term rate of teacher retention. The district is also challenged to speed up and simplify its hiring and school placement process and to hire more minority teachers

Opening the black box: Unpacking board involvement in innovation

Corporate governance research suggests that boards of directors play key roles in governing company strategy. Although qualitative research has examined board-management relationships to describe board involvement in strategy, we lack detailed insights into how directors engage with organizational members for governing a complex and long-term issue such as product innovation. Our multiple-case study of four listed pharmaceutical firms reveals a sequential process of board involvement: Directors with deep expertise govern scientific innovation, followed by the full board's involvement in its strategic aspects. The nature of director involvement varies across board levels in terms of the direction (proactive or reactive), timing (regular or spontaneous), and the extent of formality of exchanges between directors and organizational members. Our study contributes to corporate governance research by introducing the concept of board behavioral diversity and by theorizing about the multilevel, structural, and temporal dimensions of board behavior and its relational characteristics

Systematic differences between Cochrane and non-Cochrane meta-analyses on the same topic: a matched pair analysis

BACKGROUND: Meta-analyses conducted via the Cochrane Collaboration adhere to strict methodological and reporting standards aiming to minimize bias, maximize transparency/reproducibility, and improve the accuracy of summarized data. Whether this results in differences in the results reported by meta-analyses on the same topic conducted outside the Cochrane Collaboration is an open question. METHODS: We conducted a matched-pair analysis with individual meta-analyses as the unit of analysis, comparing Cochrane and non-Cochrane reviews. Using meta-analyses from the cardiovascular literature, we identified pairs that matched on intervention and outcome. The pairs were contrasted in terms of how frequently results disagreed between the Cochrane and non-Cochrane reviews, whether effect sizes and statistical precision differed systematically, and how these differences related to the frequency of secondary citations of those reviews. RESULTS: Our search yielded 40 matched pairs of reviews. The two sets were similar in terms of which was first to publication, how many studies were included, and average sample sizes. The paired reviews included a total of 344 individual clinical trials: 111 (32.3%) studies were included only in a Cochrane review, 104 (30.2%) only in a non-Cochrane review, and 129 (37.5%) in both. Stated another way, 62.5% of studies were only included in one or the other meta-analytic literature. Overall, 37.5% of pairs had discrepant results. The most common involved shifts in the width of 95% confidence intervals that would yield a different statistical interpretation of the significance of results (7 pairs). Additionally, 20% differed in the direction of the summary effect size (5 pairs) or reported greater than a 2-fold difference in its magnitude (3 pairs). Non-Cochrane reviews reported significantly higher effect sizes (P < 0.001) and lower precision (P < 0.001) than matched Cochrane reviews. Reviews reporting an effect size at least 2-fold greater than their matched pair were cited more frequently. CONCLUSIONS: Though results between topic-matched Cochrane and non-Cochrane reviews were quite similar, discrepant results were frequent, and the overlap of included studies was surprisingly low. Non-Cochrane reviews report larger effect sizes with lower precision than Cochrane reviews, indicating systematic differences, likely reflective of methodology, between the two types of reviews that could generate different interpretations of the interventions under question

Systematic differences between Cochrane and non-Cochrane meta-analyses on the same topic: a matched pair analysis

BACKGROUND: Meta-analyses conducted via the Cochrane Collaboration adhere to strict methodological and reporting standards aiming to minimize bias, maximize transparency/reproducibility, and improve the accuracy of summarized data. Whether this results in differences in the results reported by meta-analyses on the same topic conducted outside the Cochrane Collaboration is an open question. METHODS: We conducted a matched-pair analysis with individual meta-analyses as the unit of analysis, comparing Cochrane and non-Cochrane reviews. Using meta-analyses from the cardiovascular literature, we identified pairs that matched on intervention and outcome. The pairs were contrasted in terms of how frequently results disagreed between the Cochrane and non-Cochrane reviews, whether effect sizes and statistical precision differed systematically, and how these differences related to the frequency of secondary citations of those reviews. RESULTS: Our search yielded 40 matched pairs of reviews. The two sets were similar in terms of which was first to publication, how many studies were included, and average sample sizes. The paired reviews included a total of 344 individual clinical trials: 111 (32.3%) studies were included only in a Cochrane review, 104 (30.2%) only in a non-Cochrane review, and 129 (37.5%) in both. Stated another way, 62.5% of studies were only included in one or the other meta-analytic literature. Overall, 37.5% of pairs had discrepant results. The most common involved shifts in the width of 95% confidence intervals that would yield a different statistical interpretation of the significance of results (7 pairs). Additionally, 20% differed in the direction of the summary effect size (5 pairs) or reported greater than a 2-fold difference in its magnitude (3 pairs). Non-Cochrane reviews reported significantly higher effect sizes (P < 0.001) and lower precision (P < 0.001) than matched Cochrane reviews. Reviews reporting an effect size at least 2-fold greater than their matched pair were cited more frequently. CONCLUSIONS: Though results between topic-matched Cochrane and non-Cochrane reviews were quite similar, discrepant results were frequent, and the overlap of included studies was surprisingly low. Non-Cochrane reviews report larger effect sizes with lower precision than Cochrane reviews, indicating systematic differences, likely reflective of methodology, between the two types of reviews that could generate different interpretations of the interventions under question

It Could Not Be Seen Because It Could Not Be Believed on June 30, 2013

Nineteen Prescott Fire Department, Granite Mountain Hot Shot (GMHS) wildland firefighters (WF) perished in Arizona in June 2013 Yarnell Hill Fire, an inexplicable wildland fire disaster. In complex wildland fires, sudden, dynamic changes in human factors and fire conditions can occur, thus mistakes can be unfortunately fatal. Individual and organizational faults regarding the predictable, puzzling, human failures that will result in future WF deaths are addressed. The GMHS were individually, then collectively fixated with abandoning their Safety Zone to reengage, committing themselves at the worst possible time, to relocate to another Safety Zone - a form of collective tunnel vision. Our goal is to provoke meaningful discussion toward improved wildland firefighter safety with practical solutions derived from a long-established wildland firefighter expertise/performance in a fatality-prone profession. Wildfire fatalities are unavoidable, hence these proposals, applied to ongoing training, can significantly contribute to other well-thought-out and validated measures to reduce them

Interrogating child migrants or ‘Third Culture Kids’ in Asia: an introduction

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From the Margins to the Center of School Reform: A Look at the Work of Local Education Funds in Seventeen Communities

This report begins to describe the core and emerging areas of LEFs' work, their ways of working and the conditions under which they work. The seventeen organizations studied in this report were selected from among the 43 LEFs in the Network, to reflect the range in their size and geographic distribution

Organizing Business

This book offers a new thesis concerning the nature of contemporary political activity by large business firms. I will argue that a politicized leading edge of the leadership of a number of major corporations has come to play a major role in defining and promoting the shared needs of large corporations in two of the industrial democracies, the United States and the United Kingdom. Rooted in intercorporate networks through shared ownership and directorship of large companies in both countries, this politically active group of directors and top managers gives coherence and direction to the politics of business. Most business leaders are not part of what I shall term here the inner circle. Their concerns extend little beyond the immediate welfare of their own firms. But those few whose positions make them sensitive to the welfare of a wide range of firms have come to exercise a voice on behalf of the entire business community

Higher Education and Corporate Careers

American business has looked to higher education for over half a century for the training of its managers. Until the 1920s, few future managers would have sought a college education for entry into management. Although college degrees have long been the expected foundation for the medical and legal professions, it was not until this era that business turned to higher education for the socialization and preparation of its future leadership. The emergence of the large, multidivisional corporation, the rise of what business historian Alfred Chandler has termed the visible hand, placed a premium on sophisticated decision making, increasingly recognized as a developed rather than intuitive skill. As the first generation of entrepreneurial founders was gradually losing its grip on the executive suite to a new generation of professionally trained managers, college came to be viewed as a major avenue of preparation. Once it was so defined, a rising flow of interest would be assured. David O. Levine, an historian of the era, writes: There could be no greater incentive for the pursuit of higher learning than individual ambition.