The two-legged stool: the neglected role of educational standards in improving America's public schools

The author notes that raising the school-leaving age and increasing the amount of spending per pupil have been extremely important public school reforms. However, he says, sizable improvements in school quality will only be evident when these two reforms are complemented by higher standards--and when students' abilities to meet these standards are tested.Education

Predicting Success, Preventing Failure: An Investigation of the California High School Exit Exam

Examines early indicators that identify fourth-grade students in San Diego who are at risk of failing the California High School Exit Exam, discusses implications for when and how to intervene to address those factors, and makes policy recommendations

The Impact of Grading Standards on Student Achievement, Educational Attainment, and Entry-Level Earnings

Despite recent theoretical work and proposals from educational reformers, there is little empirical work on the effects of higher grading standards. In this paper we use data from the High School and Beyond survey to estimate the effects of grading standards on student achievement, educational attainment, and entry level earnings. We consider not only how grading standards affect average outcomes but also how they affect the distribution of educational gains by skill level and race/ethnicity. We find that higher standards raise test scores throughout the distribution of achievement, but that the increase is greatest toward the top of the test score distribution. Higher standards have no positive effect on educational attainment, however, and indeed have negative effects on high school graduation among blacks and Hispanics. We suggest a relative performance hypothesis to explain how higher standards may reduce educational attainment even as they increase educational achievement.

Incentives and Equity Under Standards-Based Reform

The paper considers theoretical and empirical evidence on the impact of standards-based school reform. Our theoretical synthesis distinguishes between sorting and incentive effects of high standards, and spells out the potential tradeoffs and complementarities between enhancing efficiency and equity in student achievement. Differentiated credentials can be helpful in ameliorating tradeoffs, provided that distinct signals are clearly understood, especially between cognitive and non-cognitive skills. The paper reviews trends in state-level school accountability systems, and examines empirical evidence on the impact of increased standards and expectations on student achievement. Finally, the paper reviews some of the practical challenges facing the standards movement.

Lessons in Reading Reform: Finding What Works

Evaluates elements of reforms designed to improve reading scores among students identified as lagging behind, including extended-length English classes and school years. Considers the role of teachers' experience, lessons learned, and policy implications

CAPACITIES AND PROBABILISTIC BELIEFS: A PRECARIOUS COEXISTENCE

This paper raises the problem of how to define revealed probabilistic beliefs in the context of the capacity/Choquet Expected Utility model. At the center of the analysis is a decision-theoretically axiomatized definition of ""revealed unambiguous events."" The definition is shown to impose surprisingly strong restrictions on the underlying capacity and on the set of unambiguous events; in particular, the latter is always an algebra. Alternative weaker definitions violate even minimal criteria of adequacy. Rather than finding fault with the proposed definition, we argue that our results indicate that the CEU model is epistemically restrictive, and point out that analogous problems do not arise within the Maximin Expected Utility model.

Passing the California High School Exit Exam: Have Recent Policies Improved Student Performance?

This report evaluates the effectiveness of three support services in helping struggling students pass the California High School Exit Examination (CAHSEE). The report highlights the need to help students before they first take the exam in grade 10 and introduces the CAHSEE Early Warning Model, a forecasting tool to identify at-risk students in earlier grades

Reduced-Class Distinctions: Effort, Ability, and the Education Production Function

Do smaller classes boost achievement mainly by helping teachers impart specific academic skills to students with low academic achievement? Or do they do so primarily by helping teachers engage poorly behaving students? The analysis uses the grade 3 to 4 transition in San Diego Unified School District as a source of exogenous variation in class size (given a California law funding small classes until grade 3). Grade 1 report cards allow separate identification of low-effort and low-achieving students. Results indicate that elicitation of effort or engagement, rather than the teaching of specific skills, may be the dominant channel by which small classes influence disadvantaged students.

Carefully designed multiple choice tests can help teachers to quickly determine what students don't understand

Over the last 20 years, US schools have widely adopted annual student testing, a move which many researchers believe may have been of little benefit to students' educational outcomes. Julian R. Betts, Youjin Hahn and Andrew C. Zau examine the impact of a different type of mathematics testing - one which is aimed at determining students' strengths and weaknesses in math. They find that since 2000 the Mathematics Diagnostic Testing Project in California’s second largest school district has increased student’s state test score by up to 4 percentage points. They attribute these increases to the detailed information and insights into student performance the tests provide compared to more traditional examinations