ethanporcaro/eric-fulltext-meta huggingface dataset:
Views from Private Schools: Attitudes about School Choice Programs in Three States
Author: Kisida, Brian
Date: 2015-01-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Private Schools,School Choice,Surveys,Educational Vouchers,Leaders,Attitudes,Scholarships,Parent Participation,Costs,Disadvantaged,Satisfaction,Futures (of Society),Participation,Elementary Secondary Education

As school choice programs expand in the United States, it is crucial to consider how the design of these programs shapes the supply and demand of parents' educational offerings. To better understand the school choice landscape from the viewpoint of current and would-be participants in choice programs, the authors administered an extensive survey in Spring 2014 to leaders of private schools in Florida, Indiana, and Louisiana. From Florida's relatively longstanding and lightly regulated tax-credit scholarship program to Indiana and Louisiana's younger and more heavily regulated state-funded voucher programs, these programs share some qualities while differing considerably on others. In total, 954 school leaders participated in the survey. The overall response rate was 29 percent, which is relatively high for a lengthy Internet survey. The survey reveals a number of important themes policymakers should consider when designing school choice programs: (1) School leaders identify the opportunity to serve more disadvantaged students as a primary reason for participation; (2) School leaders tend to be less satisfied with the academic preparation of choice students and the involvement of their parents compared to the nonchoice students and parents at leaders' schools; (3) In all three states, high rates of respondents reported that scholarship amounts are inadequate to cover the full cost to educate a child at their school; (4) Across these three states, school leaders' plans for future participation largely reflect current participation levels; (5) Leaders of participating schools identified a number of concerns they have as participants in their state's choice program; and (6) While leaders of nonparticipating schools cited a number of concerns that factored into their decision not to participate, concerns about possible future regulations were the most cited across all three states, followed by concerns about the effect of participation on schools' independence, character, or identity. Two appendices are included: (1) Survey-Collection Details and Characteristics of Respondents; and (2) Details of the State Scholarship Programs.
Managing the Law in Education: Strategies for Education Leaders and the Organizations That Support Them
Author: Junge, Melissa
Date: 2014-10-23
Type: Reports - Evaluative
Subjects: Educational Policy,School Law,Elementary Secondary Education,Lawyers,Leaders,Instructional Leadership,Decision Making,Program Implementation,Cooperation

Americans are increasingly divided over education policy. But education debates overlook one very important and basic fact: even good policies fail if they are poorly implemented, and it is hard to evaluate a policy's merit if it is not implemented well. That may seem obvious, but time and again policies fail because of a lack of attention to the day-to-day issues that affect education leaders' ability to turn words on a page into reality inside schools. As lawyers, the authors represent state departments of education and school districts from across the political, pedagogical, and policy spectrums, and have seen schools and districts using fundamentally different approaches improve the lives of their students. But every success story has a common theme: thoughtful and thorough implementation of the details. Implementation in education almost inevitably involves dealing with the law. So, as odd or unpleasant as it might sound, lawyers have a role to play in helping leaders realize their visions. In this paper, the authors attempt to highlight ways that education leaders-- be they state chiefs, district superintendents, principals, or teachers--can use lawyers to navigate complex networks of legal requirements to successfully implement initiatives. In short, leaders can use lawyers to identify options, understand their risks, and strategically implement decisions. Developing intentional and productive partnerships with lawyers may require a shift in mindset, so they offer tips to leaders for how to think and act differently when working with their lawyers. They also offer suggestions for ways that groups can help provide the resources and institutional support needed to help leaders more easily navigate the law and, when necessary, use lawyers effectively.
Launching New Institutions: Solving the Chicken-or-Egg Problem in American Higher Education
Author: Manning, Sylvia
Date: 2014-10-29
Type: Reports - Evaluative
Subjects: Higher Education,Accreditation (Institutions),Eligibility,Student Financial Aid,Federal Aid,Barriers,Educational Quality,Federal Government,Government Role

Currently, a US college or university must be accredited to be eligible to receive federal financial aid. To get accredited, an institution must have already been serving students, but most students are dependent on federal financial aid. As a result, in order to launch a new college or university, there is an insurmountable problem: having students is a prerequisite for accreditation, but it is difficult to attract them without access to financial aid. Therefore a classic chicken-or-egg dilemma. As the higher education debate has come to focus on the need for innovative education models, this chicken-or-egg problem is one issue that has placed accreditation on the national agenda, leading reformers to call on accreditors to change their standards and speed up their approvals. To define the most pressing problem areas in accreditation, however, it is important to distinguish the chicken-or-egg problem--which sees accreditation as a barrier to entry for new organizations--from the related but separate criticism that accreditation's focus on inputs (for example, faculty qualifications and the adequacy of facilities) is fundamentally at odds with higher education innovation. This paper argues that while the latter criticism misunderstands the value of accreditation's conservatism, the chicken-or-egg dilemma does capture a real obstacle to new organizations. In essence, accreditation is a bet that, based on current evidence, the institution will continue to offer an acceptable level of quality in the education it provides. To make this bet, accreditors unapologetically consider inputs and student outcomes.
Untapped Potential: Making the Higher Education Market Work for Students and Taxpayers
Author: Kelly, Andrew P.
Date: 2014-10-06
Type: Reports - Evaluative
Subjects: Educational Change,Postsecondary Education,Educational Quality,Educational Policy,Policy Formation,Accountability,Labor Market,Educational Innovation,Federal Government,Government Role,Accreditation (Institutions),Quality Assurance,Federal Regulation,Commercialization,Politics of Education

American universities continue to top international rankings and to attract the world's best students and faculty, leading policymakers and the public to assume the US higher education system is delivering top-notch educational value to its students. Recently, however, significant cracks have emerged in this facade of excellence. Lackluster graduation rates, rising delinquency and default rates on student loans, and poor results on measures of student learning have raised alarm bells about the return on federal investments in student financial aid. In response, reformers have increasingly questioned the federal approach to ensuring that taxpayer dollars flow to quality institutions. Decades ago, policymakers built a student financial aid (quality-assurance) system around two pillars: (1) consumer choice; and (2) hands-off regulation that relies largely on higher education accreditation. Unfortunately, flawed assumptions about how these mechanisms ought to operate have never been updated, leading to a status quo of increasing costs, subpar outcomes, and lack of innovation. In this paper--the first in a series of papers that will examine higher education quality assurance from a number of perspectives--the authors argue that policymakers should rethink the higher education system's building blocks in a way that protects consumers and taxpayers while maximizing educational opportunity. The authors advocate reforms in three specific areas: (1) Modernize, but Don't Expand, the Direct Federal Oversight Role; (2) Delegate Responsibility, but to New Authorizers; and (3) Expand and Improve Market Accountability.
Turning Lightning into Electricity: Organizing Parents for Education Reform
Author: Kelly, Andrew P.
Date: 2014-12-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Educational Change,Public Schools,Accountability,Parent Participation,Parent School Relationship,Parent Role,Empowerment,Advocacy,Community Action,Recruitment,Activism,Politics of Education,Barriers,Parent Teacher Cooperation,Volunteers,Parent Attitudes,Citizen Participation,Sustainability

Families are the primary clients of public schools, but they are one of many constituencies who have a say in how schools actually operate. In all the technocratic fervor around &quot;education reform&quot;--the broad effort to implement standards and accountability, reform teacher tenure and evaluation, and increase parental choice--it is easy to lose sight of the fact that public schools are democratically controlled. Democratic control means that schools are as much a product of politics as they are of technical expertise. No matter how promising their reform ideas, advocacy groups who are unable to compete at the grassroots level will find it difficult to make their voices heard. In the past five years, however, school reform organizations and reform-minded funders have invested in organizing and activating parents to promote reform via grassroots political action. In the past year alone, several &quot;parent power&quot; efforts have made headlines in districts and states across the country, using mass rallies, lawsuits, petition drives, and canvassing campaigns to push for policy change. Despite all this activity, these efforts have not received much attention from researchers. Existing scholarly work on community organizing and education reform has focused on the effects that organizing has on schools, student achievement, and district policy. These are worthy questions, to be sure, but less is known about how these efforts get off the ground in the first place, how they successfully mobilize parents, and how they sustain their organizations over time. These questions are fundamental in light of well- established obstacles to political participation and collective action in low-income communities. This study provides a first look at these questions by going directly to the source: parent power groups themselves. The set of groups included is by no means a representative sample, but includes groups that reserve a primary role for parents in their advocacy work, that have statewide or multistate reach, and that were willing to share their time and insights. Drawing on more than 30 structured interviews, four site visits, and examination of primary source documents and data, this report provides a series of early lessons about how groups have structured their parent organizations, what strategies make for effective recruitment and mobilization, and what the challenges are for sustaining parent engagement over time.
Three Perspectives on Getting Data Right: An Introduction to CNA Education's IRC Paper Series
Author: Muller, Robert D.
Date: 2011-10-00
Type: Reports - Descriptive
Subjects: Data Analysis,Educational Change,Educational Research,Teacher Effectiveness,Equal Education,Academic Achievement,Decision Making,Databases,Educational Policy,Data Interpretation,Government Role,Definitions,Financial Support,Federal Legislation,Educational Trends,Futures (of Society),Validity,Education Service Centers,Regional Programs,Role,Research Needs

As a research and technical assistance organization, CNA Education would be the last to deny the importance of good data and the first to applaud efforts to improve the quality and scope of the data available. Solid data are critical to CNA's mission to further general understanding of the efficacy of specific education reform initiatives and to address the needs of their district-level and state-level customers and constituents for a clearer assessment of their own specific efforts and of the available options for improving their education outcomes. The three papers in this collection (&quot;The State Data Analysis Gap: A Threat to Education Reform&quot; by Arthur Sheekey and Michael Allen; &quot;Getting State Education Data Right: What We Can Learn from Tennessee&quot; by Kyle Southern and Joe Jones; and &quot;The Equitable Distribution of Effective Teachers: Can States Meet the Research Challenges Required for Success?&quot; by Michael Allen) make the strong case, however, that the availability of good data is not all that policymakers and educators need for their decisions. In addition, they need to understand the limitations of their data and how to use and interpret them appropriately. And they must ask--and answer to their satisfaction--a number of conceptual and technical questions that have implications for the validity, interpretation, and very meaning of the data they seek to use.
Assessment of the Florida College and Career Readiness Initiative: Year 1 Report
Author: Mokher, Christine
Date: 2013-11-06
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: College Readiness,Career Readiness,High School Students,Grade 11,Grade 12,Program Implementation,Teacher Attitudes,Teacher Surveys,Program Effectiveness,Group Discussion,Courses,Testing,Barriers,Program Improvement,College Preparation,Eligibility,Student Participation,Information Dissemination

The intent of the Florida College and Career Readiness Initiative (FCCRI) is to help students become college-ready by high school graduation, and subsequently to succeed in obtaining college credentials. This is done by testing college readiness in grade 11 and requiring that students testing below college-ready take college readiness and success (CRS) courses in grade 12. This report describes findings from the first year of a five-year evaluation of the FCCRI conducted by CNA, funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of Education. One goal of the report is to help Florida educators at all levels to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the FCCRI's design and implementation, as well as describe recommendations from teachers to make the initiative more effective. A second goal is to inform educators in other states and the research community about our work. The report presents (1) statistics describing the extent to which college readiness testing and CRS course offerings are implemented, (2) results from a statewide survey of teachers' perceptions of the effectiveness of the FCCRI, and (3) feedback from small group discussions with teachers about impediments to CRS courses and ways to ameliorate them. We conclude by summarizing our findings and describing our efforts to follow up on teachers' recommendations for the most effective ways to improve the FCCRI. The following are appended: (1) Characteristics of school samples; (2) Glossary of assessments; and (3) Teacher recommendations for removing impediments to FCCRI's effectiveness. The report also includes a glossary, a list of figures, and a list of tables. [This report was written with John Hughes, Jen Atkin, Maria DiFuccia, Jane Alexander, Chris Sun, and Jiffy Lansing.]
Assessment of the Florida College and Career Readiness Initiative: Year 2 Report, Executive Summary
Author: Mokher, Christine
Date: 2014-12-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: College Readiness,Career Readiness,High School Students,Grade 11,Grade 12,Program Implementation,Program Effectiveness,Courses,Testing,Program Improvement,College Preparation,Learner Engagement,Barriers,Surveys,Interviews,Observation

The Florida College and Career Readiness Initiative (FCCRI) is a statewide program designed to assess the college readiness of high school students in 11th grade, and for those assessed as not college-ready, to provide instruction in the 12th grade that will lead to their college success. The assessment used is the Postsecondary Education Readiness Test (PERT), which includes math and reading/writing components. This report describes feedback CNA Corporation obtained during the 2013/14 school year about the strengths and weaknesses of the FCCRI and ways to increase its effectiveness, particularly as it relates to improving those 12th grade college readiness and success (CRS) courses. This feedback was obtained through a survey of 109 CRS course teachers in 89 schools and 33 districts; site visits to six school districts, where the authors nterviewed 24 CRS teachers in 12 schools, 11 high school counselors, and seven district curriculum specialists and observed eight CRS classes; and reviews of essays from 329 CRS course students. They also interviewed a mix of 36 administrators and instructors at six nearby state colleges. [This report was written with Caitlin Ahearn, Jen Atkin, Michael Flory, Jennifer Lansing, Juliana Pearson, James Rosenbaum, and Christopher Sun.]
&quot;Using Data&quot; to Inform Decisions: How Teachers Use Data to Inform Practice and Improve Student Performance in Mathematics. Results from a Randomized Experiment of Program Efficacy
Author: Cavalluzzo, Linda
Date: 2014-03-31
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Data,Program Effectiveness,Faculty Development,Intervention,Problem Solving,Learning Disabilities,Mathematics Teachers,Elementary School Mathematics,Grade 4,Grade 5,Use Studies,Users (Information),Summative Evaluation,Formative Evaluation,Mathematics Tests,Mathematics Achievement,Factor Analysis,Student Improvement,Evaluation Utilization,Qualitative Research,Statistical Analysis,Surveys,Semi Structured Interviews,Hierarchical Linear Modeling,Regression (Statistics)

The purpose of this study is to evaluate, using a randomized experimental design, the efficacy of TERC's &quot;Using Data&quot; program to change teacher behavior and improve student learning outcomes. The &quot;Using Data&quot; intervention provides professional development and technical assistance to teachers to help them use data collaboratively to identify and solve systemic student learning problems. The intervention was implemented by school-based data teams composed of a designated data coach and four grade 4 and 5 math teachers in Duval County Public Schools, a large, urban school district serving Jacksonville, Florida, during school years 2011-12 and 2012-13. In the first year of the study, teachers in the treatment group participated in professional development events and technical assistance sessions that exposed them to &quot;Using Data&quot; and helped them implement its processes. In the second year the teachers received additional assistance with implementation. Sixty (60) schools were recruited to participate in the study. The authors conclude that the weight of the evidence presented in this report indicates that &quot;Using Data&quot; improves teachers' outcomes after one year, and improves the outcomes of their students in high-needs schools after two years. Three appendices are included: (1) Study Questionnaires--Sample Questions; (2) Psychometric Analysis of &quot;Using Data&quot; Scales; and (3) Power Analysis.
Assessment of the Florida College and Career Readiness Initiative: Year 2 Report
Author: Mokher, Christine
Date: 2014-12-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: College Readiness,Career Readiness,High School Students,Grade 11,Grade 12,Program Implementation,Teacher Attitudes,Teacher Surveys,Program Effectiveness,Courses,Testing,Program Improvement,College Preparation,Learner Engagement,Course Content,Educational Cooperation,Barriers,State Colleges,Remedial Instruction,Student Attitudes,Satisfaction,Academic Aspiration,Occupational Aspiration,Student School Relationship,Student Characteristics,Interviews

The Florida College and Career Readiness Initiative is a statewide policy that mandates college placement testing of 11th-graders who meet high school graduation criteria but are unlikely to meet college readiness criteria. Students who score below college-ready on the Postsecondary Education Readiness Test (PERT) are required to take math and English/language arts college readiness and success courses in 12th grade. This report discusses qualitative feedback from students, teachers, district administrators, and college faculty and staff from the 2013/14 school year. It examines how educators perceive the effectiveness of the initiative and barriers to implementation, what the grade 12 courses look like in practice, how K-12 and postsecondary institutions collaborate around the initiative, what types of promising practices Florida's state colleges use to prepare students for college and careers, and what high school students think could be done to better prepare them for post-high school plans. A set of supplemental tables and figures is appended. [This report was written with Caitlin Ahearn, Jen Atkin, Michael Flory, Jennifer Lansing, Juliana Pearson, James Rosenbaum, and Christopher Sun.]
Florida Study of Career and Technical Education. Final Report
Author: Jacobson, Louis
Date: 2014-00-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Vocational Education,Outcomes of Education,High School Seniors,Enrollment,Employment,Income,Academic Persistence,Postsecondary Education,Educational Attainment,Rural Urban Differences,High Schools,Magnet Schools,Vocational High Schools,Academic Education,Career Education,Technical Education

A key goal of the &quot;Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act of 2006&quot; (&quot;Perkins IV&quot;) is to ensure career and technical education (CTE) programs are widely available for preparing high school and college students for &quot;high skill, high wage, or high demand occupations in current or emerging professions&quot; (&quot;Perkins IV,&quot; 2006, Sec. 2-1). A related goal is to support schools in overcoming &quot;geographic and other barriers affecting rural students and special populations&quot; (Sec. 135-c-10). &quot;Perkins IV&quot; goals also include developing programs of study incorporating &quot;rigorous and challenging&quot; academic skills as well as technical skills, and to link CTE programs at high schools and community colleges with bachelor's degree programs at four-year colleges. This study examines whether outcomes for CTE students--high school graduation, achievement levels, postsecondary enrollment, and employment and earnings--reflect a positive impact from CTE participation. This study uses data tracking virtually all Florida high students who entered grade 9 in 1996 as they progressed from high school to postsecondary education and the workforce through the end of 2007. The analysis examines differences between CTE concentrators and nonconcentrators who reached grade 12 for the following outcomes: (1) High school course taking, including the completion of an academic curriculum called the &quot;New Basics&quot; that is required for admission to public four-year colleges in Florida; (2) Transitions after high school to college or the workforce; (3) College course taking, including enrollment in and completion of CTE and remedial courses; (4) Attainment of postsecondary credentials (certificates or degrees); and (5) Employment and earnings after leaving school. The following appendices are included: (1) Replication of Tables Using an Alternate Definition of a Secondary CTE Concentrator; (2) Outcomes for Public School Students in the 1996 Florida Grade 9 Cohort; (3) Supplemental Tables; (4) Methodology and Results for Regression Models; and (5) Sensitivity Analyses for Post-School Earnings Regression Models.