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2. You Can't Choose if You Don't Know: The Failure to Properly Inform Parents about NCLB School Choice
- Author
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University of Arkansas, Education Working Paper Archive, Greene, Jay P., Butcher, Jonathan, Jensen, Laura Israel, and Shock, Catherine
- Abstract
To measure the extent to which schools are properly informing parents about NCLB school choice we sent emails to choice-eligible schools requesting information. The emails were made ambiguous in their origin and purpose so that schools could believe that they came from parents. What we found was widespread lack of cooperation. The vast majority of schools failed to reply at all. Those that did reply were mostly concerned with who we were and why we were asking. Only a tiny minority of schools provided us with the information requested. It is clear that schools are failing to properly inform parents about NCLB school choice. It is also obvious that little is being done to monitor or enforce compliance with these provisions of NCLB. (Contains 2 tables and 24 endnotes.)
- Published
- 2007
3. Bottom-Up Structure: Collective Bargaining, Transfer Rights, and the Plight of Disadvantaged Schools
- Author
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University of Arkansas, Education Working Paper Archive and Moe, Terry M.
- Abstract
In the positive theory of public bureaucracy, the prevailing view is that the structure of public agencies is designed from the top down by political superiors. Faced with bureaucrats who may disagree with them on policy and who are advantaged by private information, superiors choose rules and procedures to try to ensure that agencies do what they are supposed to do. At least some portion of bureaucratic structure, however, cannot be explained in this way. It emerges from the bottom up through collective bargaining, it is driven by the organizational power of ordinary bureaucrats rather than by their information power, and it results in work rules intended to promote their occupational interests rather than to have any specific effects on implementation or policy--although the unintended consequences for the latter may be significant. When this happens, the theory overlooks an aspect of structure that is essential for understanding the way government operates. This paper begins to explore the connections between collective bargaining, bottom-up structure, and bureaucratic behavior. The empirical focus is on the public schools, the bureaucrats are public school teachers, and the analysis shows that a very common type of contract rule--which gives senior teachers transfer rights over jobs--affects the way teachers distribute themselves across schools, and leads to a situation in which disadvantaged schools (those with high percentages of minorities) find it especially difficult to attract quality teachers. What the analysis shows, more generally, is that even very simple types of bottom-up structure can have significant effects on bureaucrats and their agencies--and the current theory needs to recognize as much. (Contains 5 tables and 23 footnotes.)
- Published
- 2006
4. Who Chooses, Who Uses? Initial Evidence from the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program
- Author
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University of Arkansas, Education Working Paper Archive, Wolf, Patrick, Eissa, Nada, and Gutmann, Babette
- Abstract
The federal government recently enacted its first school voucher program as a pilot project in the District of Columbia. To be eligible, students need to be entering grades K-12 and have a family income at or below 185 percent of the poverty level. Although a rigorous analysis of the Opportunity Scholarship Program's impact on student achievement and other outcomes remains a prospect for the future, at this early point initial data exists regarding the families that are applying for the program and the students that are using and not using the voucher when offered. Here we present a preliminary analysis of those data. We find that program applicants are somewhat disadvantaged relative to non-applicants regarding educational characteristics and family income, and are more likely to be African American, than non-applicants. The fact that the program is means-tested appears to be central to the finding that it is reaching a more disadvantaged population of students. When we examine all students that received a voucher award, and compare the group of voucher users with the group of voucher decliners, we find two significant differences. First, scholarship users are educationally advantaged in important ways relative to scholarship decliners. They are much less likely to have learning or physical disabilities, and younger scholarship users evidence somewhat higher test scores than non-users in similar grades. Second, we find that scholarship non-users are more likely to report that their existing school has various specialized educational programs and more extensive facilities. Although these results suggest some measure of selectivity in the group of actual program participants, the data do not indicate conclusively if that selectivity is a function of the decisions and behavior of participating private schools or the result of the rational decisions of consumers in a newly-expanded education market. (Contains 10 tables and 29 footnotes.)
- Published
- 2006
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