A Clear Link between School and Teacher Characteristics, Student Demographics, and Student Achievement

Introduction With the growing national interest in educational accountability, educational reform and improved students' achievement, it is important to conduct a study that can provide information about the relationship between educational resources, student demographics and student achievement. Policy makers, educational leaders, and community groups are beginning to realize that student achievement is a function of variables other than per-pupil allocations of funds, and they are searching for variables that can predict and therefore impact the levels of achievement of students in public schools. The goal of current education reform according to Odden and Clune (1995) is to produce higher student achievement. The movement to reform schools is motivated in large measures by economic issues (Hanushek, 1997). Concerns over the strength of the economy, the incomes of the citizens, and the gap between standards of living for different racial groups are forcefully grounded in questions about the quality of public schools, and the quality of graduates. The State of North Carolina is currently undergoing educational reform known as the ABCs' of public education. The ABC program focuses on strong accountability with emphasis on high educational standards, teaching the basics, and maximum local control (N.C. State Department of Instruction, 1997). Some specific features of the ABC plan are : to provide achievement standards measured on a school-by-school basis, to provide maximum flexibility in the use of resources, to provide incentive funding for staffs at schools achieving at high levels, to provide assistance teams to schools identified as low performing schools, to provide procedures for the State Board to dismiss administrators and teachers in low performing schools, and to ensure renewed emphasis on reading, writing and mathematics. Researchers have identified the need to focus on the internal allocation of resources among school buildings within a school district, and other micro-level analysis (Monk, 1990; monk & Underwood, 1988; Odden, 1988). This purpose of this research was to examine the impact of selected educational resources and student/family demographics on the achievement scores of fourth-grade students in public elementary schools during the 1995-96 school year. The key questions that guided the structure of this study were: 1. Is there a significant relationship between selected school characteristics and students' reading and mathematics achievement scores? 2. Is there a significant relationship between selected teachers characteristics and students' reading and mathematics achievement scores? 3. Is there a significant relationship between selected student/family demographics and students' reading and mathematics achievement scores? Research Question One The first research question addressed the relationship between selected school characteristics and mathematics and reading achievement of fourth-grade students in selected county's public elementary schools. Fourth-grade class size and school size were the two variables used to answer this question. Class size is an important educational resource because it indicates the availability of teachers that interact with students. A decade of research on the relationship between class size and student achievement have failed to produce conclusive results. The sentiment that smaller is better is well established sentiment among teachers of all grade level in elementary school according to a survey of over 1,000 teachers by New York State United Teachers Organization in 1974. About 80% of the teachers surveyed stated that smaller class size was extremely important in improving student achievement. Glass and Smith (1982) found that small classrooms offer friendly environment and climate that is more conducing to learning. Greenwald, Hedges and Laine (1996) emphasized that many educators believe that class size is a critical variable in student learning, but according to Hallinan and Sorensen (1985), the relationship between class size and student achievement had produced remarkably inconsistent results. …