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This study considers why Florida has been the most aggressive state in adopting school vouchers. Vouchers are consistent with Florida’s tradition of aggressive educational accountability policies, arising from the state’s moderate social conservatism, openness to privatization, and state demographic characteristics. Even with this fertile political soil, vouchers probably would not have been adopted without the efforts of Governor Jeb Bush. The programs also rest on a shaky legal foundation because of the state’s Blaine Amendment and constitutional provisions for “public” and “uniform” schools. The authors conclude that state-level voucher programs in Florida and other states are on uncertain political and legal ground.

Small classes and small schools appear to have educational benefits for students. In small classes, children experience fewer disrup tions and receive more personal attention and individualized instruction. Likewise, in small schools, students appear to feel safer and less likely to get "lost in the crowd" and teachers are able to provide a more coherent curricu lum. There is a large research literature, including many of the papers in this volume, suggesting that these qualities of the learning environment translate

Charter schools represent one part of the larger movement toward parental choice in the U.S. school system. The intention of these programs is to use market mechanisms to improve school efficiency and innovation. This study provides evidence on these issues using data on Michigan and California. We develop an informal theory in which the number of entering charter schools depends on how closely the distribution of education programs in public and private schools matches parental preferences. To test this theory, we regress the number of charter schools in each school district on characteristics of parents and public schools in those same districts. The results indicate that more charter schools locate where populations are diverse in terms of race, income, and adult education levels. Vertical differentiation (quality) of public schools does not appear to play a significant role. Differences in results across the two states can be attributed to differences in state policies that affect the degree of competition in the education market place.

A Nation at Risk (NAR; National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983) had a tremendous impact on what schools do and has since spawned other reforms that attest to the report's ongoing influence. Coming in the wake of a decade of economic stagnation and import pressures from overseas producers, the authors of NAR blamed these problems on schools. In this article, we show that there was little justification for this conclusion, then or now. Although education clearly plays a role in the economy, it is only one of many factors. We find little evidence that there is a large or growing mismatch between worker skills and employer demands. Moreover, the American work force and economy continue to be among the most productive in the world. We should improve our schools and our economy, but real improvement will only occur when their problems are correctly diagnosed.

One of the key barriers in accessing postsecondary opportunities for many students is financial aid. This chapter begins by providing a review of prior evidence on the relationship between financial aid and postsecondary outcomes. One type of financial aid intervention that challenges traditional aid and scholarship options are "promise programs." These programs make commitments to low-income students when they are much younger than when students typically apply for aid and have the potential to encourage students to better prepare during high school, develop the social capital they need to navigate the path to college, and pay for growing college costs. In this chapter, the author describes the design and rationale for The Degree Project (TDP), which is the first randomized trial of a promise scholarship in the United States. In addition to the important new evidence the demonstration program will generate, TDP also shows how educators and researchers can work together to provide the insight and answers policy makers need to address very real education gaps.

The education production function (EPF) underlies all quantitative research on the effects of school resources. The EPF is rooted in the economic theory of production and is defined as all the combinations of inputs that produce any given set of school outputs (e.g., test scores). This article describes the meaning, variations, and assumptions of EPFs, including recent developments in value-added models. The article shows how value-added models arguably improve the validity of EPF estimates compared with earlier generations of research, as well as how value addition can be used to estimate effects of individual teachers and schools for purposes of accountability.

The failure to account for group differences in responsiveness to financial aid is a primary shortcoming of existing higher education research, and compromises the explanatory power of theories and models. Even more importantly, it limits the ability of policymakers and practitioners to achieve the important goals of increased college success and reduced achievement gaps. In this chapter, we identify and explore concepts from social sciences disciplines which hold promise in terms of informing future theoretical developments in the field. Drawing primarily on the work of behavioral economists, and economic sociologists, we discuss concepts such as aversion to risk, work centrality, ambiguity aversion, and consistency theory which may serve to illuminate several unexplained anomalies in prior empirical research. We also describe the methodological problems plaguing the study of financial aid and argue that tests of existing theories, as well as those we propose here, require research that addresses selection bias in who receives aid. We then describe other aspects of future research critical to the testing of these concepts.

In order to improve the quality of the nation’s teachers, the public education system has long relied on requirements and rewards for formal teacher education, experience, and other traits—the “credentials strategy.” However, policymakers and some prominent educators are increasingly embracing a radical overhaul—an “accountability strategy”— that largely ignores these traits and instead rewards teachers’ measured contributions to student results. In this chapter, I review evidence about the statistical validity of a variety of teacher quality measures. I also argue that this alone is not enough to determine how and when teacher quality measures should be used. Instead, I outline the criterion of “policy validity,” which is determined by statistical validity as well as the specific functions that the teacher quality measures serve in the education system and the costs of producing both the measures and the underlying teacher qualities they represent. Based on this framework and the most recent value-added-based research, I find that neither the traditional credentials strategy nor a simple value-added-based accountability strategy is likely to best address the teacher quality problem. Instead, as in the private sector, a valid policy approach requires using multiple strategies and measures that provide signals of teacher effectiveness and formative and summative assessments that facilitate and encourage improvement. Specifically, the evidence suggests that teachers be rewarded not for their graduate degrees, but for a combination of experience, certain types of professional development, and teacher and school performance. More generally, improving the quality of teachers will require a comprehensive strategy that few current or proposed policies provide. Acknowledgements: Many of the studies from which the ideas in this chapter have grown were funded by the U.S. Department of Education, Institute for Education Sciences and the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS). In addition to this support, I gratefully acknowledge comments by Robert Floden, Drew Gitomer, David Monk, and Tim Sass and participants in research presentations at the 2007 Educational Testing Service Invitational Conference in San Francisco and at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The views expressed here are solely those of the author who is of course responsible for all remaining errors.

Quantitative social scientists seek to develop ever-better tools for measuring and improving school teacher performance. One approach uses data on individual students' past test scores to predict subsequent scores and then subtracts the (counterfactual) prediction from the actual scores to estimate teachers' “value added.” But there is considerable debate about what educational benefits these measures might yield. I discuss scholarly agreements and disagreements about statistical properties of teacher value-added measures and argue that most key research questions cannot be answered by the types of studies that now dominate the literature ( 1 ).