Education Policy

Introduction

Failing public schools, tumbling U.S. student achievement, declining school funding, persistent achievement gaps, and recruiting and retaining effective teachers are just a few of the critical issues that school districts across the nation face every day. More rigorous research is needed to understand the issues facing schools and educators and to create effective solutions to address them. This is why the Institute elevated its education research area to a full research program in 2008. The new program regroups nine faculty fellows from a variety of disciplines and overlaps with other programs, including the Center for Improving Methods for Quantitative Policy Research, or Q-Center (see pp. 41–46). Led by education economist David Figlio, faculty are investigating issues concerning:

Overview of Activities

Effects of School Vouchers
Education economist David Figlio is evaluating Florida’s Corporate Tax Credit Scholarship Program, the largest school voucher program in the United States and one that is often held up as a model for other states. He and two IPR graduate research assistants, Cassandra Hart and Molly Metzger, are currently analyzing the performance of more than 24,000 voucher recipients statewide using two years of original source data from all participating private schools in the state.

Of the one million children eligible for the program (as determined by family income), only around 3 percent apply to participate. To provide a more in-depth picture of what motivates families to enroll their children in the program and use the vouchers, Figlio is also undertaking telephone and Internet surveys of participating families. Figlio and his team are using quasi-experimental research tools to analyze student performance and family satisfaction.

Additionally, they are examining the effect of private school competition on public school performance and how a large statewide voucher program changes the market for private education. Figlio is Orrington Lunt Professor of Education and Social Policy.

School Accountability and School Practice
What are the effects of school accountability design on student achievement and school behaviors? Figlio is currently analyzing these effects using original survey data collected from a three-wave census of public school principals in Florida and a two-wave survey of teachers in a state-representative sample of Florida schools. He and fellow researchers Cecilia Rouse of Princeton University and Dan Goldhaber and Jane Hannaway of the Urban Institute hope to measure the degree to which accountability is changing school policies and practices in an attempt to get “inside the black box” of performance effects.

With Tim Sass of Florida State University and Li Feng of the State University of New York at Fredonia, he is also studying how school accountability pressures affect teachers’ decisions to change schools or leave the profession altogether, in addition to teacher quality.

Evaluating State Pre-K Programs
The number of state-run pre-kindergarten programs has doubled since 1980, with more than a million children enrolled in programs across 38 states. Social psychologist Thomas D. Cook and IPR graduate research assistant Vivian Wong have published a study examining the quality of pre-kindergarten programs in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. Wong, Cook, and their co-authors used data from the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) to examine the effectiveness of programs in five states: Michigan, New Jersey, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and West Virginia. They found positive effects on children’s print awareness, early mathematics, and receptive vocabulary skills. But the results vary by state and outcome and thus cannot be generalized across all state pre-kindergarten programs. In further research, they hope to unlock the reasons why some state programs generate a larger cognitive impact than others. Cook is Joan and Sarepta Harrison Chair in Ethics and Justice.

Teacher Quality
Michelle Reininger, assistant professor of education, social policy, and learning sciences, is working with Chicago Public Schools (CPS) on a longitudinal study of pre-service teachers (those who are training to be teachers). As the nation’s third largest urban school district, CPS struggles each year to fill its classrooms with high-quality teachers, especially in hard-to-staff subjects such as math, science, and bilingual education.

Thanks to funding from the Joyce Foundation, Reininger is in the midst of a two-year project, collecting data on 3,000 CPS student teachers as they enter and exit the system’s student-teaching program. The entry survey collects student teachers’ opinions regarding their upcoming student teaching placement, including their preparedness, expectations, and career plans, with the exit survey following up on their experiences and plans. The goal is to develop a better understanding of what makes for effective student teaching placement. Reininger also noted that one important aspect of improving the program could be to help CPS identify and target potentially successful teachers early in the teacher pipeline for full-time positions in the year following their student-teaching placement.

Distributed Leadership in Schools
Education professor James Spillane, Spencer T. and Ann W. Olin Professor in Learning and Organizational Change, is lead investigator of the Distributed Leadership Project, a longitudinal study of urban school leadership. Building on theories of distributed cognition, the central goal of the project is to make the “black box” of the practice of school leadership more transparent by analyzing how leaders think and act to improve mathematics, science, and literacy instruction in their schools. He is also principal investigator of the quantitative and qualitative study Distributed Leadership for Middle School Mathematics Education, started in 2004. The study has developed and validated a social network instrument for identifying formal and informal leadership in schools, in addition to designing and validating several logs for studying leadership and management practice.

Math Education Recommendations
The National Mathematics Advisory Panel released its final report, “Analyzing Foundations for Success,” in 2008. The panel, created in 2006, examined scientific evidence related to the teaching and learning of mathematics and proposed solutions for fixing the “broken” system of mathematics education in the United States. Spillane was one contributor to a special issue of Educational Research that discussed the report’s recommendations and potential impact. In his article, Spillane notes that alignment with key policy ideas might highlight some recommendations; however, an increasingly complex system of nonprofit and for-profit education providers, strong local and state influence in the exercise of federal policy, and a deteriorating economic situation could serve to stymie others.

Performance Incentives for Principals
Management and strategy professor Michael Mazzeo is looking at how incentives might improve the performance of public schools via principals that run them. He and Julie Berry Cullen of the University of California, San Diego, are using a unique data set, compiling records from all Texas public schools from 1989 to 2006. The data set combines “monitoring” information—detailed campus-level scores from state-administered standardized tests—and “incentives” information—the complete employment and wage histories of all school principals during this period. Preliminary findings suggest that labor-market opportunities and career concerns potentially provide effective incentives for public school administrators to increase efforts to improve academic performance.

Assessing Spatial Learning
With his colleagues in the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (SILC), statistician and education researcher Larry Hedges is working to achieve a better understanding of spatial relationships, which serve as the foundation for a wide range of reasoning and communication skills. Yet few methods exist for assessing young children’s spatial skills. Hedges, Board of Trustees Professor in Statistics and Social Policy, is leading the SILC project to develop a spatial assessment battery, a standardized instrument for assessing spatial cognition. He and his colleagues are working to adapt tasks from research settings for large-scale, real-world use to provide sensitive and differentiated knowledge about skill profiles. Improving the level of spatial functioning in the population could lead to significant improvements in workforce effectiveness and, eventually, issues of social equity.

Gaps in U.S. Academic Achievement
Hedges and his colleagues are documenting the social distribution of academic achievement in the United States by examining various achievement gaps, including those of gender, race, ethnicity, and social class, in different ways. A major part of this study evaluates patterns of between- and within-school variability of student achievement. The researchers also examine whether different sources of evidence lead to the same conclusions, in addition to the limited longitudinal evidence, attempting to coordinate it with repeated cross-sectional evidence. They expect that combining such data might help to understand differences in patterns of academic achievement between minorities. They hope to find out more about how large achievement gaps are when students enter school and how they evolve over time; how social and school contexts affect these initial gaps and their subsequent growth; and whether between-school differences grow over time.

College Access and Success
In the United States, 95 percent of all high school seniors plan on attending college, yet half of students who plan to get a college degree fail to do so, and this number drops to under 20 percent for African American students. This is the unintended result of an implicit policy that education and social policy professor James Rosenbaum has called “college for all.”

With funding from the Spencer Foundation, Rosenbaum and his team are finalizing a study of 1,800 high school seniors in 12 high schools. Rosenbaum’s earlier research suggested that high schools have radically changed the educational goals they pose for students, but they have not always changed their procedures to enable students to be prepared for these new goals. The researchers are examining students’ college plans and the kind of information and action plans they are receiving from guidance counselors. They are considering which students have what kinds of information and plans and from where the information comes. They are also looking at which informational sources can reduce socioeconomic and ethnic gaps in college information, plans, attendance, and the institution attended. The researchers are surveying the students at the beginning and at the end of their senior year, in addition to interviewing their guidance counselors. By identifying poor sources of information and problematic plans, they hope to identify and remedy some of the problems that can lead to ineffective college planning and decisions.

Barriers to College and Coaching Programs
In Chicago, 83 percent of students plan on attending college, but only 64 percent of these students with college plans actually attend. Rosenbaum is looking at possible causes for the 20 percent decline in the move from high school to college. He and his graduate students are analyzing barriers to the college enrollment process and the cultural capital deficient that might be a barrier to first-generation college students successfully completing the college application process and realizing their college plans. Their findings indicate that college coaching programs in high school might help improve the percentage of students who successfully enter college out of high school.

Rosenbaum and his team have undertaken a study of the advising model that Chicago Public Schools implemented in some of its high schools in 2005 to improve students’ college outcomes. In the program, “college coaches” are charged with identifying and reducing cultural barriers to college access for disadvantaged students. Analyzing ethnographic data, Rosenbaum, with IPR graduate research assistants Jennifer Stephan, Michelle Naffziger, and Lisbeth Goble, seeks to understand subtle cultural elements that impede disadvantaged students, how college coaches try to identify and overcome these cultural barriers, and how the students respond. The researchers also analyze a survey of all seniors in the district before and after the onset of the program to estimate the effect coaches have on college enrollment, to determine the extent to which actions and specific college plans mediate coach effects, and to discern whether effects vary by students’ social status, academic achievement, and race/ethnicity. Their results suggest that among students with general college plans, the coaches improve some college actions, the formation of specific plans, and some types of college enrollment. In particular, coaches benefit students who typically are not well-served by counselors.

College Completion Initiative for Low-Income Parents
Developmental psychologist P. Lindsay Chase-Lansdale is one of the researchers working on an important new $69-million college completion initiative led by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The researchers will identify and analyze existing supports and barriers to postsecondary educational attainment among young, low-income parents whose children are in Educare Centers in Chicago, Denver, and Miami. The centers serve children from 6 weeks to 5 years old. In addition, the project will design a pilot intervention program that uses high-quality, early childhood education centers as a vehicle for supporting parents’ continuing educational development. The Gates initiative seeks to double the number of low-income students who attend college and earn degrees by 2025, an increase of more than 250,000 graduates per year. Chase-Lansdale is collaborating with the Ounce of Prevention Fund and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn of Columbia University.

Tax Policy and Education Funding
The property tax has long been the primary local source of funding for schools and, along with state aid, provides the lion’s share of total resources for schools. In recent decades, though, the property tax has come under siege as a source of revenue for schools. Management and strategy professor Therese McGuire and Leslie Papke of Michigan State University set out to examine the various charges against the property tax as a means of funding schools and to compare alternative sources of revenue, such as sales and income taxes, with the property tax.

The principal charge has been that, since property wealth is unequally distributed across school districts, reliance on this source of revenue results in unacceptable differences in property tax rates, property revenues per pupil, and most importantly, spending per pupil across districts. The property tax is also criticized for being inefficient and complex. Dissatisfaction with the tax appears to be growing, as evidenced by the number of attempts to constrain spending and challenge such taxes in court. Among the possible explanations for the declining support for property taxes are demographic shifts, with rising numbers of the elderly and declining numbers of school-age children. McGuire is ConAgra Foods Research Professor.

Juvenile Delinquency and Comer
In 2000, Cook with colleagues Robert Murphy and H. David Hunt published a multilevel study of Chicago inner-city schools to evaluate James Comer’s School Development Program (SDP), a whole-school reform effort designed to improve a school’s social and academic climate through three teams of operations (school planning, mental health, and parents). One of their main findings was that SDP seemed to reduce delinquency between grades 5 and 8, based on the youths’ self-reported information.

In a new study, Cook and Paul Hirschfield of Rutgers examine whether the same effect would be seen when using juvenile justice system records to measure delinquency instead of self-reports. With unparalleled access to individual-level records about contact with the justice system from police and school records—especially from the Cook County Juvenile Court records until age 17—the two researchers do not find any evidence showing that Chicago’s Comer schools reduce delinquency between Grades 5 and 8 or even the high school years. Indeed, their finding casts doubt on prior claims about SDP’s effects on delinquency. They point to SDP as creating “a thin reed” on which to stack any theories or policies and call for more rigorous, broader, multilevel studies to determine the true effects of SDP, including on rates of juvenile delinquency.

Abilities, Schooling Choices, and Racial Gaps
Economist Sergio Urzúa uses data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) to create a model of the relationship between abilities, schooling choices, and racial gaps in labor market outcomes. In his analysis, he distinguishes observed cognitive and noncognitive measures from unobserved cognitive and noncognitive abilities. He analyzes schooling decisions based on future earnings, family background, and unobserved abilities. The results indicate that, even after controlling for abilities, significant racial labor market gaps exist. They also suggest that the standard practice of equating observed test scores might overcompensate for differentials in ability.