Search

For-profit schooling is one of the most hotly debated issues in education policy discussions. Proponents argue that for-profit schools have incentives to reduce costs and to innovate, leading to both higher quality and greater efficiency in education. Critics maintain that for-profit schools cannot be trusted to place the interest of children over profitability. Buried in this position is the belief that for-profits would cut quality in the process of cutting costs. Researchers can gain insight into this debate by examining school systems where vouchers have been implemented on a large scale. In 1981, Chile began financing public and most private schools with vouchers. This paper uses 2005 data on over 250,000 fourth-graders to compare achievement across sectors. Initial results indicate that non-profits have a small advantage over for-profit and public schools, once student and peer attributes and selection bias are controlled for. There is no significant difference in achievement between for-profit and public schools. When for-profits and non-profits are subdivided by ownership, for-profit chains and Catholic schools have a large advantage over other sectors. In some cases, evangelical schools produce the lowest achievement. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will argue against the implementation of public policies which require or encourage individual teacher bonuses based on student test scores. Teacher incentive programs as they are now conceived and implemented in Public Education Policy are unable to produce higher levels of student success. Student achievement is often characterized as job skills learned in comparison to other students worldwide. Success and failure in student achievement should no longer be measured in terms of standardized test scores. Due to outsourcing, an increasing number of jobs in the United States require applicants to acquire advanced degrees. The traditional basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic are no longer sufficient to keep American students competitive with advanced international students. Standardized testing, because it evaluates only basic skills, is not an adequate measure of student success. In order to better account for worldwide competition, measures of student achievement should compare job skills between American and international students in terms of human capital. Programs which link teacher pay to test scores will only stagnate the intellectual development of students. Public policy and education literature argues that incentive-based pay for teachers encourages instructors to focus on test-taking skills and basics without developing the critical and analytical skills of students. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an analysis of the power of political images and policy narratives. I argue that the debate over desegregation policies in Los Angeles, California in the 1970s established two dominant policy images about the purposes of public schools: They are meant to promote both academic achievement and racial equality. Each of these images included several policy narratives to support it. Over the next two decades, these images remained. Eventually, however, one became more dominant over the other. As the district moved away from desegregation, the image of schools as promoters of equality diminished, and the academic achievement image took precedence. This was true for several district policies, including policies that originated as part of the desegregation plan. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past three decades, education policymaking has become focused on three major issues: student achievement, educational standards, and accountability for performance. This focus has provided the impetus for a new development in which central governments (state governments and the federal government) have intervened more and more intensely into the details of substantive school policy. In this paper, I show that the emergence of this new agenda has been the product not merely of changes in economic or social conditions, but of political entrepreneurship. A powerful, if heterogeneous, coalition of business elites, economists, governors, and dissident educational intellectuals worked to establish a new agenda in education focusing on achievement by linking this theme to economic rejuvenation, equality of opportunity, and democracy. They charged that low academic achievement in the United States was primarily a function of poor school performance, thereby setting the stage for a new policy agenda centered on school improvement. This successful issue definition profoundly shaped educational policy during the 1980s, and provided the intellectual foundation for even greater expansions of centralized authority in education in the 1990s and 2000s. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do local politics influence student outcomes in public education? This paper derives amodel of resource allocation for public education in municipal contexts and assesses howinformal institutions between local politicians and bureaucrats influence studentachievement in public education. Using original survey data collected in schools across12 wards of Bangalore, India in the fall of 2007, I present and test a model of decisionmakingfor allocating resources to public education that accounts specifically for howinformal institutions between locally elected politicians and bureaucratic officialsinfluence student outcomes in public education. Results suggest that positiverelationships between bureaucrats and politicians have a positive and significantinfluence on student achievement in math and language scores. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses the effect of NPM on educational achievement. Existing evidence is weak and shows no effect, but a new survey coupled to detailed data on more than 40,000 students indicates that NPM increases the effect of social background. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses macro-level structural factors and agent characteristics behind the OECD's student achievement scores (PISA) of more than 40 countries. Germany is used to show how measuring human capital connects education and the economy. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a contentious debate over the relationship between institutional design and student academic achievement (Smith 2005). We further the school choice debate by considering the relationship between different types of school institutions, parental and community variables and third grade student test scores using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS-K) data. Though it has been infrequently used by political scientists (Cox and Witko 2008), this panel data set allows us to overcome problems that plague many school choice studies by examining the academic performance of the same students over time, holding unobserved child-level variables constant. It is also unique in that it follows younger children. Since it is large and nationally representative, this data set also allows us to make generalizable conclusions. We demonstrate that academic performance is unlikely to be improved by simply attending a school of choice, public or private, and instead argue that parental variables and other aspects of a school's institutional environment and community are more important, though still modest, determinants of academic achievement. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I investigate whether Florida's public school districts enjoy economies of size - as the school districts increase in size, does student success rise? I build upon literature of two fields of social science concerning organizational size. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]