ethanporcaro/eric-fulltext-meta huggingface dataset:
Barriers to STEM Education for Rural Girls: A Missing Link to Innovation for a Better Bangladesh. Echidna Global Scholars Program, Policy Paper
Author: Siddiqa, Nasrin
Date: 2019-10-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Foreign Countries,Barriers,STEM Education,Rural Schools,Females,Gender Bias,Equal Education,Educational Environment,Social Attitudes,Government Role,Community Role,Self Esteem,Secondary School Students,Parents,Secondary School Teachers,Social Influences,Equal Opportunities (Jobs),Occupations,Student Attitudes,Student Interests,Coaching (Performance),Teacher Attitudes,Administrator Attitudes,Family Influence,Cultural Influences,Public Schools,Curriculum,School Role,Social Change

As one of the world's fastest-growing economies, Bangladesh aims to become a middle-income country by 2021 and a high-income country by 2041. To attain these goals, the country must face global challenges head on by strengthening existing industries and preparing itself for industries that have yet to emerge. To do this, it must tap the full potential of its human capital. Although Bangladesh made strides in access to education during the Millennium Development Goals era, poor girls continue to fall behind despite their ambitions to lead the country to change--a gap that affects their work outcomes once they leave school. The skills that Bangladesh's youth need to thrive in a world of rapid technological advancement will require a response by policymakers and practitioners alike. This policy paper unveils the barriers to educational opportunities for rural girls in Bangladesh, focusing specifically on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. It reflects upon a survey of 500 rural secondary-level schoolgirls, 100 parents, and 75 teachers from 30 rural schools of the district of Gazipur. The study identified barriers to STEM education at three levels--individual, institutional, and societal--that revealed both systemic and socio-cultural issues that actors in policy and practice can tackle. It provides clear recommendations for action and examples of practices that have started to fill the gap globally. If Bangladesh is to accomplish its goals and tap the potential of all its youth for rapid development, breaking the barriers to STEM education for all children is a key place to start. [This report was co-authored with Amanda Braga.]
Special Education and School Choice in New Orleans
Author: McKittrick, Lanya
Date: 2019-05-00
Type: Reports - Descriptive
Subjects: Special Education,School Choice,Students with Disabilities,Barriers,Parents,Intervention,Funding Formulas,Stakeholders,Cooperation,Educational Innovation,Administrative Organization,Inclusion,Access to Information,Educational Quality,Rating Scales,Teacher Competencies,Faculty Development

The Center on Reinventing Public Education has long focused on making school choice work. Parents of children with disabilities face greater barriers to choosing schools for their children. This brief is the first installment in a series of reports examining how parents of children with disabilities experience the process of choosing schools. The goal is to identify barriers and help school system leaders develop interventions that can guide parents to overcome them. New Orleans has systems in place to provide information to parents and to assist with the process of enrolling children in schools. However, many of the barriers identified intersect with the challenges facing the city's school system as a whole--such as the need to increase the overall quality of options available to families, and to recruit, train, and support educators to meet a broad range of student needs.
Girls&apos; Transitions to Work through Higher-Quality TVET Programs in Nepal. Echidna Global Scholars Program, Policy Paper
Author: Paudel, Anil
Date: 2019-10-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Foreign Countries,Vocational Education,Barriers,Females,Access to Education,Equal Education,Labor Market,Social Attitudes,Cultural Influences,Job Skills,Employment Qualifications,Equal Opportunities (Jobs),Dropouts,Career Guidance,Scholarships,Educational Policy,Government Role,Nongovernmental Organizations,Educational Finance

Technical and vocational education and training (TVET) is widely considered an important tool in strengthening the school-to-work transition, reducing poverty, and achieving economic growth. However, significant barriers prevent girls in Nepal from realizing such opportunities. This paper, drawing from field research and desk review, identifies three major factors--education, the labor market, and social norms--underlying why girls are not able to leverage TVET to their advantage. Overall, an underemphasis and underinvestment in TVET by families, schools, government, and the private sector pose the greatest challenge to improving girls' participation in TVET and thus to girls' transitions to work. Based on my study and professional experience working to enhance the right of children to education, this paper provides policy recommendations for government, private sector, and nongovernmental organizations to improve girls' participation in TVET in order to improve their labor market outcomes and life prospects. The recommendations are concentrated in three different areas: improving girls' &quot;access&quot; to TVET programs, enabling their &quot;completion&quot; of TVET programs, and facilitating their &quot;transition&quot; to work. Increasing investment in TVET--along with creating a gender-transformative approach that enables females to participate more fully in both TVET programs and the labor market--would meaningfully help to realize the promises of education in Nepal.
Special Education and School Choice in Washington, D.C.
Author: McKittrick, Lanya
Date: 2019-12-00
Type: Reports - Descriptive
Subjects: Special Education,School Choice,Students with Disabilities,Barriers,Intervention,Access to Education,Stakeholders,Cooperative Planning,Agency Cooperation,Individualized Education Programs,Expertise,Access to Information,Charter Schools,Public Schools

The Center on Reinventing Public Education has long focused on making school choice work. Parents of children with disabilities face greater barriers to choosing schools for their children. This brief is the first installment in a series of reports examining how parents of children with disabilities experience the process of choosing schools. The goal is to identify barriers and help school system leaders develop interventions that can guide parents to overcome them. Washington, D.C., has systems in place to improve the school choice process for families--most notably the collaboration among stakeholders. Many of the challenges identified are known to the parent support organizations; stakeholders are working to make progress in these areas.
Paying for Education Outcomes at Scale in India
Author: Gustafsson-Wright, Emily
Date: 2019-11-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Educational Finance,Outcomes of Education,Foreign Countries,Bond Issues,Educational Innovation,Investment,Program Effectiveness,Philanthropic Foundations,Out of School Youth,Educational Quality,Intervention,Developing Nations,Educationally Disadvantaged,Womens Education,Data Use,Government Role

With a flourishing social enterprise ecosystem and an appetite among NGOs and policymakers for testing new solutions, India is playing a leading role in its use of innovative financing for development. One such innovative tool is an impact bond, which is a type of outcome-based financing structure where upfront capital is given to service providers by investors. While evidence on outcome-based financing in education, and impact bonds specifically, is still emerging, there are key lessons to be drawn for the application of such tools to education in India. Three impact bonds have been contracted in India to date, with two in the education sector. In the first-- the Educate Girls Development Impact Bond (DIB)--the UBS Optimus Foundation provided upfront capital to Educate Girls to get out-of-school girls into the classroom and improve learning outcomes for boys and girls. After three years, the DIB had overachieved its enrollment and learning targets, and the investment was repaid by the Children's Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF). The second project in education, the Quality Education India (QEI) DIB brings together four service providers--Gyan Shala, Kaivalya Education Foundation, the Society for All Round Development, and Educational Initiatives (Mindspark)/Pratham Infotech Foundation--to implement a range of interventions with the goal of improving learning outcomes over a four-year period through 2022. UBS Optimus Foundation provided upfront capital for the interventions, and if metrics are successfully achieved, the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, together with a group of outcome funders convened by the British Asian Trust, will pay for the outcomes. This study seeks to place these two education DIBs in the context of the Indian education landscape, and to investigate the overall potential and limitations of outcome-based financing for education in India. While impact bonds are by no means the solution to all the challenges the education system faces, judicious use of the tool has the potential to focus financing on impact, promote effective interventions and service providers, and reinforce the use of data and evidence in decisionmaking. [Support for this report was provided by the British Asian Trust.]
Should I Stay of Should I Go? Neighbors&apos; Effects on University Enrollment. CEP Discussion Paper No. 1653
Author: Fernandez, Andrés Barrios
Date: 2019-10-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Foreign Countries,Enrollment,Social Influences,College Applicants,College Attendance,Neighborhoods,Geographic Location,Decision Making,Enrollment Influences

This paper investigates whether the decision to attend university depends on university enrollment of close neighbors. I create a unique dataset combining detailed geographic information and educational records from different public agencies in Chile, and exploit the quasi-random variation generated by the rules that determine eligibility for student loans. I find that close neighbors have a large and significant impact on university enrollment of younger applicants. Potential applicants are around 11 percentage points more likely to attend university if a close neighbor enrolled the year before. This effect is particularly strong in areas with low exposure to university and among individuals who are more likely to interact; the effect decreases both with geographic and social distance and is weaker for individuals who have spent less time in the neighborhood. I also show that the increase in university attendance translates into retention and university completion. These effects are mediated by an increase in applications rather than by an improvement on applicants' academic performance. This set of results suggests that policies that expand access to university generate positive spillovers on close peers of the direct beneficiaries.
A Decade of Declines in Violence among San Francisco Youth. Fact Sheet
Author: Males, Mike
Date: 2019-07-00
Type: Reports - Descriptive
Subjects: Violence,Delinquency,Correctional Institutions,Institutionalized Persons,Youth

Violent youth crimes fell by 64 percent between 2008 and 2018 (Figure 1). For the last three years, the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) has failed to specify the offense type for nearly 90 percent of youth arrests in San Francisco (CJCJ, 2018). However, arrest data over the last ten years show declines in violent arrests across all age groups, with youth accounting for the largest drop (SFPD, 2019). In June 2019, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed an ordinance which outlines a plan to close the county's juvenile hall by the end of 2021 (BOS, 2019). The decision is based on the unprecedented decline in San Francisco youth crime over the past decade which has resulted in a concurrent decline in the juvenile hall population (Tucker, 2019). Today, with a design capacity of 150, San Francisco's juvenile hall houses less than 30 youth (SFJPD, 2019).
Measuring and Explaining Management in Schools: New Approaches Using Public Data. CEP Discussion Paper No. 1656
Author: Leaver, Clare
Date: 2019-10-00
Type: Reports - Descriptive
Subjects: School Administration,School Effectiveness,Academic Achievement,Measurement Techniques,Public Schools,Foreign Countries,Student School Relationship,Teacher Selection,Incentives,Compensation (Remuneration),Work Ethic,School Culture,Parent School Relationship,Teacher Motivation,International Assessment

Why do some students learn more in some schools than others? One consideration receiving growing attention is school management. To study this, researchers need to be able to measure school management accurately and cheaply at scale, and also explain any observed relationship between school management and student learning. This paper introduces a new approach to measurement using existing public data, and applies it to build a management index covering 15,000 schools across 65 countries, and another index covering nearly all public schools in Brazil. Both indices show a strong, positive relationship between school management and student learning. The paper then develops a simple model that formalizes the intuition that strong management practices might be driving learning gains via incentive and selection effects among teachers, students and parents. The paper shows that the predictions of this model hold in public data for Latin America, and draws out implications for policy.
Inequalities in Student to Course Match: Evidence from Linked Administrative Data. CEP Discussion Paper No. 1647
Author: Campbell, Stuart
Date: 2019-08-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Student College Relationship,Educational Attainment,Socioeconomic Status,Gender Differences,College Choice,Course Selection (Students),Education Work Relationship,Income,Foreign Countries,College Students

This paper examines inequalities in the match between student quality and university quality using linked administrative data from schools, universities and tax authorities. We analyse two measures of match at the university-subject (course) level, based on student academic attainment, and graduate earnings. We find that students from lower socio-economic groups systematically undermatch for both measures across the distribution of attainment, with particularly stark socio-economic gaps for the most undermatched. While there are negligible gender gaps in academic match, high-attaining women systematically undermatch in terms of expected earnings, largely driven by subject choice.
Metrics for Early Childhood Systems: A National Scan
Author: Center for the Study of Social Policy
Date: 2018-09-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Young Children,Measures (Individuals),Well Being,Family (Sociological Unit),Child Health,Child Development,Learning,Social Development,Emotional Development,Family Environment,Social Environment,Social Indicators,Social Services,Child Care,Early Childhood Education

This report provides the results of a national scan of measures being used by early childhood systems and initiatives to gauge the well-being of young children and their families. The purpose of the project was to better understand the state of the field and to identify opportunities to drive improvements in measurement that could help contribute to better early childhood outcomes. Over the past decade, the authors have seen the rapid spread of early childhood systems and initiatives. Each of these efforts has developed its own set of measures to understand and assess children's well-being and to observe changes over time. The authors reviewed 39 such measure sets, attempting to include as many of the initiatives as possible touching on early childhood and a significant, but by no means exhaustive or representative, sample of state and local early childhood systems. Even this limited scan produced more than 500 measures for review. The authors classified each of the measures in three ways: (1) Domains; (2) Categories; and (3) Concepts. The document is organized as follows: (1) Conclusions; (2) Summary tables; (3) Methodology in the metrics scan; and (4) Detailed listing of all the measures reviewed. [This report was prepared by National Institute for Children's Health Quality (NICHQ).]
Non-Tenure-Track Faculty and Community Engagement: How the 2020 Carnegie Community Engagement Classification Application Can Encourage Campuses to Support Non-Tenure-Track Faculty and Their Community Engagement. NERCHE Working Paper: 2016 Series, Issue 1
Author: LaFave, Allison
Date: 2016-05-00
Type: Reports - Evaluative
Subjects: Nontenured Faculty,College Faculty,Teacher Participation,Teacher Role,Teaching Conditions,Women Faculty,Gender Bias,Minority Group Teachers,Racial Bias,Barriers,Teacher Recruitment,Teacher Selection,Job Security,Teacher Salaries,Teacher Employment Benefits,Resources,Teacher Promotion,Teacher Evaluation,Faculty Development,Academic Freedom,Unions,Participative Decision Making,School Policy,School Community Relationship

In 2006, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching developed an elective classification for community engagement for institutions of higher education. To receive the classification, campuses must complete an application and respond to questions by providing evidence that demonstrates a commitment to sustaining and increasing their community engagement efforts (Welch &amp; Saltmarsh, 2013). Many of the application questions relate to policies and practices that affect faculty careers. For example, the 2015 Community Engagement Classification application asked institutions to describe relevant professional development opportunities and ways in which faculty community engagement is incentivized, recognized, and rewarded. These questions are important, as research has shown that faculty members are central to campus community engagement efforts (O'Meara, Sandmann, Saltmarsh, &amp; Giles, 2011). Yet, the 2015 Community Engagement Classification application failed to capture the contributions of and supports for non-tenure-track faculty (NTTF), an ever-growing segment of the faculty population (Burgan, 2006; Hoeller, 2014). This is not surprising, as few institutions collect data about their NTTF or have adequate structures to support their careers (Kezar, 2012; New Faculty Majority [NFM], 2014). However, until the classification application requests this information, it is impossible to know what role NTTF play in the larger institutional commitment to community engagement. If the institutionalization of community engagement is heavily dependent upon faculty, then future advancement of community engagement will be increasingly dependent on NTTF as well. This paper seeks to answer two key questions. First, unless campuses facilitate and encourage the full participation of NTTF, can institutions truly maximize their community engagement potential? Second, if fair treatment of faculty is a form of community engagement in and of itself, do institutions that subject their NTTF to unfair wages and working conditions deserve the community engagement classification?
Spotlight on VET: Finland
Author: Cedefop - European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training
Date: 2019-00-00
Type: Reports - Descriptive
Subjects: Foreign Countries,Vocational Education,Higher Education,Postsecondary Education,Adult Education,Secondary Education,Workplace Learning,Educational Policy,Lifelong Learning,Employment Level

Finnish vocational education and training is competence-based and learner-oriented. A personal competence development plan is drawn up for each learner. It charts and recognises the skills previously acquired by the learner and outlines any further competences the learner needs and how they can be acquired in different learning environments. Vocational education and training (VET) supports lifelong learning and learners' development as human beings and members of society. It provides learners with knowledge and skills necessary in further studies and promotes employment. Communication and interaction competence, mathematics and science competence and citizenship and working life competence are included in all IVET programmes. In Finland, VET is an attractive choice. The government is currently undertaking vocational education and training (VET) system reform, which aims to renew VET legislation and the financing system, and to promote learning at the workplace. All VET programmes ensure eligibility for higher education studies. National qualification requirements ensure standardised vocational competence and are the basis for evaluating learning outcomes. The Finnish National Agency for Education develops them in broad cooperation with stakeholders (employer organisations, trade and student unions). Representatives from enterprises contribute to development of national qualification requirements; they also organise and plan workplace training and competence tests, as well as assessing the tests.
The Challenges of Rewarding New Forms of Scholarship: Creating Academic Cultures That Support Community-Engaged Scholarship. A Report on a &quot;Bringing Theory to Practice&quot; Seminar Held May 15, 2014. NERCHE Working Paper: 2014 Series, Issue 2
Author: Saltmarsh, John
Date: 2014-09-00
Type: Reports - Descriptive
Subjects: Scholarship,Theory Practice Relationship,College Faculty,Teacher Researchers,Community Involvement,Seminars,Incentives,Annual Reports,Faculty Organizations,Governance,Grants,Information Dissemination,Strategic Planning

The purpose of the &quot;Bringing Theory to Practice&quot; May 15th seminar was to examine and explore a wide range of faculty rewards (including promotion criteria, awards, faculty development support, and policies at various levels) that provide incentives and recognition to faculty for undertaking community-engaged scholarship (CES). The central problem the seminar addressed is that most universities lack a system of incentives and supports for faculty who undertake (or are considering) community-engaged scholarship addressing broad social impact. Thirty individuals participated in the seminar, primarily faculty and administrators from the five campuses in the University of Massachusetts system representing a range of disciplines and various levels of faculty rank. The seminar offered an opportunity to examine what is being done to reward community engagement across the campuses of the University of Massachusetts system within the context of national efforts and change initiatives, and in light of some emergent campus discussions. This paper briefly describes the seminar structure and findings and concludes with recommendations.