The Boston University-Chelsea Partnership or the Role of Networking for School System Reform

The longstanding partnership between Boston University and the Chelsea Public School District of Chelsea, Massachusetts is unique for many reasons. Perhaps the most recognizable feature of this Partnership, however, is that it is the only example of an American university engaging in the day-to-day management of a public school system. The BU/Chelsea partnership will come to an official end in 2008. The original intent of the partnership has always been to provide Chelsea with the strong foundation to run its schools autonomously. In an effort to build this foundation, the university has, over the years, made a point of sharing its managerial and educational expertise. The future development and the effective and efficient management of the Chelsea School District will not depend solely upon whether the university has shared its expertise effectively, however. If that were the case, at the termination of the project, even the intangible assets, e.g. knowledge, upon which the success of the District was based, will be lost. Instead, Chelsea¿s opportunity to continue to achieve excellent performance results depends on how well Boston University, the ¿flagship business¿ of the Partnership, has been able to share, with the other members of the Network, the responsibility of managing the system. Moreover, continuing the good work begun almost twenty years ago depends on the intellectual capital the District has managed to ¿accumulate¿, and on the ability to produce new capital, through the promotion of knowledge-management processes. This report endeavors to determine how the Partnership changed the involvement of staff members, students, their families and the community as a whole, thereby promoting the creation of a network of primarily private and non-profit institutions (already in existence or created at the time) to improve the schooling system.JRC.G.9-Econometrics and applied statistic

Making inroads in educational leadership within the Euro-Mediterranean context : a collaborative initiative between Italy and Malta

A sense of urgency shapes our national discourse on state education. Students strive to meet new academic standards while their teachers work to improve the quality and equity of education opportunities. Yet achievement gaps persist, particularly in urban and rural schools . The demand for effective leadership is clear. We need school leaders who visualise successful student learning, understand the work necessary to achieve it, and have the skills to engage with others to make it happen. How can we prepare more individuals to meet these challenges? This paper explores what three universities – two in Italy and one in Malta – are doing to establish a programme that offers an innovative pathway to school leadership. It presents the inception of this partnership, the rationale behind the discourse that has evolved over the years, and the establishment of links between the universities and other bodies within the Mediterranean and Commonwealth contexts with the aim of preparing the next generation of school leaders needed within the Euro-Mediterranean region. The concluding part presents a number of opportunities that lie ahead and highlights the various challenges that await us as we embark on this journey.peer-reviewe

The Characteristics of Social Participation in Europe: Evidence from ESS2002

This report investigates the characteristics of social involvement in Europe by tracing and identikit of the shares of individuals that are more likely to be involved with different kinds of formal organizations and showing how each of these groups perceives the political, economical, and relational spheres of social reality. The analysis covers 19 European countries and is based on indicators for which the data has been principally drawn from the European Social Survey of 2002. The results indicate an heterogeneous Europe in which Nordic and Continental countries are adequately representing by the existing indicators, which determine the representation of reality that we are using. Mediterranean and Eastern countries, on the other side, appear follow different participatory schemes. Thus, alternative variables, such as informal participation, must be collected and analyzed to inform policies that can effectively support the different forms of interactions (both formal and informal) between State and Society. Moreover, education has a consistently positive effect for all kinds of participation in all the countries under analysis. Such result advocates for looking at education as one of the possibly most transversal policy actions to undertake and suggests the importance of working on the quality of education systems both at basic and higher level.JRC.G.9-Econometrics and statistical support to antifrau

The role of school leadership on student achievement: Evidence from TIMSS2003

Leadership, and especially head-teachers’ leadership, has been object of study since the late ‘60s, but the concept of leadership is neither unanimously defined, nor a consensus has been yet reached on its actual role and actual relevance within the school environment (Fullan, 2001; Sergiovanni, 2001; Harris, 2005). Good leadership can certainly contribute to school improvement by abetting the motivation, participation, and coordination of the teachers; recent studies have widened the range of action of school leadership research to the various organizational levels: school managers, department heads, coordinators, teachers (Goldhaber, 2002; Harris, 2004), and distributed leadership that could yield a higher impact on student achievement than what yet shown (Spillane et al., 2001, 2004). This dissertation takes its moves within the strand of research that identifies a significant role of leadership for student achievement (e.g. Edmonds, 1979; Cheng, 2002; Marzano, 2003) and tries to understand whether there are patterns of behavior of head-teachers that yield better results than others with respect to facilitating the student learning process and whether such patterns are consistent or replicable across countries. To address this question, the study uses the TIMSS2003 and investigates the relationship between head-teacher time allocation and school characteristics, student background, and student achievement in 18 countries. The model used in the empirical analysis is a three level Multilevel Model with random effects (evaluated using the R-Statistics software) that aims at evaluating the interaction effect between a particular school level variable (the time used by the head-teacher in managerial or leadership activities) and the explanatory variables describing school and student characteristics. What the study shows is that head-teacher specialization (either in management or in leadership) has negligible direct effect on student achievement. Most of all, however, head-teacher specialization is correlated to a lower impact of family SES on student achievement. Moreover, by investigating the impact of school management and school leadership on student achievement on students with different family background in terms of education, it is apparent that the high concentrations of school leadership are especially valuable for students of lower SES. On the other hand, the high concentrations of school management are most valuable for the students of higher SES. One possible explanation of these effects is that the attentiveness to the leadership process implies a deep involvement of the head-teacher in activities related to the modeling and tailoring of the educational process to the needs of the students. Such process has its highest payoffs on the students who come from disadvantaged situations and need special attentions in order to fully express their potential. On the other hand, the focus on the managerial side aims at rationalizing and making the best use of resources. This approach has high payoffs on students of all extractions, but is specifically relevant for the students of higher SES who are possibly already quite independent and whose performance can improve autonomously by making use of the extra resources that the management can provide. The analysis replication of the analysis on a country-by-country level confirms the existence of the afore-mentioned effects. More specifically, the results of the analysis suggest that, in the majority of cases, the head-teacher specialization appears to be correlated to a significant reduction in the dependence of student results from their family socioeconomic status. The same effect can be identified for both Math and Science in most countries. Nonetheless, the identification of a specialization-effect does not say much about the reasons for its existence. One possible explanation is that head-teachers are professionals that try to use at its best the opportunities provided by the institutional setup of the school system. In the more decentralized school systems that leave to the schools responsibilities in terms of monetary sanctions/incentives (hiring and firing, salary upgrades…), the head-teachers would tend to make use of these opportunities and focus most on management activities. Vice versa, in more centralized school systems, which leave to the schools only responsibilities that do not involve a monetary side, the head-teachers would stress their roles as role-models, educators, and motivators for their staff and collaborators. Hence, the final part of the research investigates whether the effect of the declared head-teacher specialization appears to go in the same direction as it could be predicted by looking at the macro-level institutional characteristics of the school system. These data suggest that school leadership and school management do have an impact on student results. However, the variables that enter in the process of determining the head-teacher time allocation are too many for indicating any specific policy direction based on average country behaviors. Still, the specialization of head-teachers in leadership or management is related to significant turnouts in terms of reduced needs of the students to rely only on the family resources (family SES) for improving their performance. In policy terms, such results suggest the need of allowing for different managerial strategies that could exploit local knowledge leads to foster the system’s equity and excellence. The dissertation is organized in 4 chapter plus 2 appendixes. The first introductory chapter looks at the economic nature of the educational good, the importance of its dissemination, and what are some of the possible interaction schemes among the system actors. The second chapter dives in the concepts of school leadership and management by looking at how it has evolved in the past 40 years. Subsequently, it addresses the limitations of the studies that have tried to establish a link between school leadership and student achievement, suggests how these limits can be overcome by means of a more comprehensive definition of the concept and of more advanced statistical techniques. The third chapter presents the research project on the TIMSS2003 dataset, the operationalization of the variables, the model for the statistical analysis, and the results of the study. The fourth chapter further discusses the results by contextualizing them within the legal and operational frameworks of the analyzed educational systems, and it concludes by addressing the limitation of the study, the indications for further research, and the possible suggestions in terms of policy making. The first appendix presents in detail the statistics for all the countries under investigation. The second and last appendix shows the detailed results for the analytic models at aggregate level and reports the dispersion of the residuals for each modelpeer-reviewe

Improving the reliability of cohesion policy databases

In this contribution, we present an innovative data-driven model to reconstruct a reliable temporal pattern for time-lagged statistical monetary figures. Our research cuts across several domains regarding the production of robust economic inferences and the bridging of top-down aggregated information from central databases with disaggregated information obtained from local sources or national statistical offices. Our test bed case study is the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). The application we discuss deals with the reported time lag between the local expenditures of ERDF by beneficiaries in Italian regions and the corresponding payments reported in the European Commission database. Our model reconstructs the timing of these local expenditures by back-dating the observed European Commission reimbursements. The inferred estimates are then validated against the expenditures reported from the Italian National Managing Authorities (NMAs) in terms of cumulative monetary difference. The lower cumulative yearly distance of our modelled expenditures compared to the official European Commission payments confirms the robustness of our model. Using sensitivity analysis, we also analyse the relative importance of the modelling parameters on the cumulative distance between the modelled and reported expenditures. The parameters with the greatest influence on the uncertainty of this distance are the following: first, how the non-clearly regionalised expenditures are attributed to individual regions; and second, the number of backward years that the residuals of the yearly payments are spread onto. In general, the distance between the modelled and reported expenditures can be further reduced by fixing these parameters. However, the gain is only marginal for some regions. The present study paves the way for modelling exercises that are aimed at more reliable estimates of the expenditures on the ground by the ultimate beneficiaries of European funds. Additionally, the output databases can contribute to enhancing the reliability of econometric studies on the effectiveness of European Union (EU) funds

Il Sistema di Istruzione e Formazione ed il Sistema Economico: Natura del Bene Istruzione e Meccanismi di Interazione tra gli Agenti del Sistema

Il successo economico di ciascun individuo - nonché l'apporto individuale che questi può dare al progresso sociale - dipendono largamente dalla provenienza e dalle modalità di produzione delle abilità e conoscenze a disposizione di ciascuno. I genitori, l'influenza dei pari, le capacità individuali e la scolarizzazione sono solo alcuni dei fattori che contribuiscono allo sviluppo delle abilità e del capitale umano individuale, tuttavia la scuola occupa un posto speciale perché può essere direttamente influenzata dalle politiche pubbliche e ciò induce ad enfatizzarne particolarmente il ruolo. La recente revisione di medio termine della strategia di Lisbona ha confermato il ruolo centrale dell'istruzione e della formazione nell'agenda europea per l'occupazione e la crescita. La capacità di affrontare adeguatamente quest'impegno progettuale, tuttavia, dipende anche da una corretta concettualizzazione dell'oggetto del servizio, l'istruzione, e dalla corretta strutturazione del problema, ovvero come migliorare la qualità del sistema per migliorare la qualità dei risultati degli studenti. Il presente contributo insiste sulle caratteristiche economiche del bene istruzione e, in conformità a queste caratteristiche, presenta le diverse strategie che possono essere implementate per gestire il servizio integrando l'autonomia istituzionale della scuola con efficaci sistemi di accountability e favorendo lo sviluppo di partnership pubblico-privato per il finanziamento del servizio, in modo da incentivare la responsabilizzazione degli attori nell'utilizzo di crescenti margini decisionali e di azione strategica.JRC.DG.G.9-Econometrics and applied statistic

Why Should Teachers Want School Accountability? Lessons from a Comparative Approach to the Subject

In the last decades, educational policies have been more and more engaged with the topic of school accountability, and they have required the development of alternative accountability models for monitoring students’ skills and knowledge. Yet, it is not always clear why teachers – who already have the guidance of legal and methodological principles – should be interested in a systemic analytical tool for investigating their pupils’ achievements. Only the teacher, each teacher, knows the social and cultural issues related to the development of his or her students’ intellectual capital; this information – obtained through years of class-work – is crucial for deciding the most effective way to present the curricular contents. The problem with this form of the equation is that it has a mere bi-dimensional character: the student on one side, and the teacher (or, at most, the school staff) on the other; there is no link between the individual – class-work – and the public dimension of education – student’s progress with respect to the other students. The teacher’s endeavor ends up being nothing more than one of many pieces of a figure-less puzzle; the creation of an accountability system tries to sort out this apparent disorder by introducing a third term of comparison that contextualizes each piece with respect to a wider design.JRC.G.9-Econometrics and statistical support to antifrau