Gene Glass

The No Child Left Behind Act has brought great attention to the high school graduation rate as one of the mandatory accountability measures for public school systems. However, there is no consensus on how to calculate the high school graduation rate given the lack of longitudinal databases that track individual students. This study reviews literature on and practices in reporting high school graduation rates, compares graduation rate estimates yielded from alternative methods, and estimates discrepancies between alternative results at national, state, and state ethnic group levels. Despite the graduation rate method used, results indicate that high school graduation rates in the U.S. have been declining in recent years and that graduation rates for black and Hispanic students lag substantially behind those of white students. As to graduation rate method preferred, this study found no evidence that the conceptually more complex methods yield more accurate or valid graduation rate est...

There is continuing controversy about the optimal or appropriate age at which children should start school. The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between age and achievement. It is an attempt to evaluate the hypothesis that older students fare better academically than their younger classmates. Findings indicate that on average for students in elementary school there is positive linear relationship between age and achievement for age normal peers. Even though there is positive linear relationship, the difference in average test scores between the oldest and youngest students is not great and by the time students reach 10th grade the positive linear relationship has disappeared. For overage students there is on average a negative linear relationship between age and achievement at all grade levels. That is, the negative relationship between age and achievement remains constant over time. These results argue against modifying entrance age policies, delaying school ent...

Council,1 uses poor and misleading methods to draw some very controversial findings. The re-port presents readily available statistics to generate hundreds of tables and figures concerning each state’s education “inputs, ” “outputs, ” and demographics. Interspersed among these tables are a mere dozen pages of analysis intended to support the conclusion, in the words of ALEC Executive Director Lori Roman, that per-pupil spending increases, pupil-to-teacher ratio reduc-tions and raises for teachers “ … are not going to make the difference in raising American student achievement to international standards. Empowering parents will ” (p. 1). But ineptness and na-iveté in measurement and data analysis have thwarted any attempt to legitimately derive such conclusions.

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This article reports on the differences in democratic education across school types, using the US National Household Education Survey (NHES) of 1999. We replicate the estimation approach of Campbell (1998) and find a strongly positive effect from attendance at Catholic school or private independent schools on community service participation, civic skills, civic confidence, political knowledge and political tolerance. The results are reasonably robust to alternative specifications. We consider the implications of these results for policy.

This article (1) examines the overall structure of regulatory research oversight in the United States; (2) details the origins and evolution of federal legislation pertaining to the protection of human subjects in biomedical and behavioral treatment and research; and (3) describes the expansion of oversight regulation from biomedical and behavioral treatment areas to the social sciences. In addition, the paper describes three areas identified by compliance administrators as susceptible to abuse: (1) informed consent, (2) assessment of risks and benefits, and (3) equitable selection of human subjects. There is a discussion of existing tensions in the implementation of oversight policies and procedures. Finally, the paper identifies four issues for future consideration: (1) scope of the mandate regarding protection of human subjects, (2) impact on the nature of research being undertaken, (3) financial burden of compliance and oversight activities, and (4) ethical standards, constraint...

I synthesize some of the lessons we have learned about systemic school reform in order and derive two explicit hypotheses about when such reforms are likely to be more and less successful. The first hypothesis focuses on program implementation: to achieve success, any systemic reform must overcome challenges at each stage of the policy-making process, from agenda-setting to policy choice to implementation. The second hypothesis focuses on the federated nature of education policy-making in the United States: any successful systemic reform must offer a program that aligns local efforts with state and sometimes federal policy. I derive and test more specific hypotheses related to recent systemic reform efforts in the Los Angeles region—especially the Los Angeles Annenberg Metropolitan Project, or LAAMP—which ran from 1995 through 2001. The case confirms the hypotheses and enables a clearer understanding of systemic school reform.

Under the Commonwealth Accountability Testing System (CATS), Kentucky’s public schools have been assigned individualized baseline and improvement goal indices based upon past school performance in relation to the 2014 statewide index goal of 100. Each school’s CATS Accountability Index, a measure of school performance based upon both cognitive and non-cognitive measures, has then been compared to these individualized improvement goals for the purpose of designating schools as Meet Goal, Progressing, and Assistance Level (Kentucky Department of Education (KDE), 2000). Considered an interim target model, the design of CATS has been intended to negate the biasing effects of socioeconomic factors on school performance on accountability tests through the individualization of school goals (Ladd. 2001). Results of this study showed that 39.9 % to 55.5 % of the variance of the CATS indices was shared by school socioeconomic factors. Analysis of this interim target model for the 2000-2002 bi...

Many proponents of school choice use the claim of the market’s capability to enhance efficiency and improve performance to call for its expansion. But no markets are perfectly competitive, and the local market for public goods is filled with institutional arrangements that make it differ from the neoclassical ideal. In this paper, we look at a particular institution—the provisions of charter school legislation—and assess how it affects the ability of charter schools to gain market share. Using data from the 36 states that had passed charter legislation by 2000, and controlling for a variety of other factors, we estimate a model of the effects of various provisions in the charter laws on charter school market share. We find that two such provisions, one concerning the sponsorship of charters and another their funding sources, appear to have a strong effect on the market share of charter schools.

Increasing diversity in the population is a major issue for educators in North America, presenting political as well as educational challenges. This paper examines Canadian educational policy responses to four kinds of diversity - bilingualism (French/English), multiculturalism, the situation of aboriginal peoples, and the problem of poverty. A description of each issue leads to some speculations or propositions on the nature of diversity and appropriate educational responses to it.

This study examined the distribution of financial aid among financially dependent four-year college students and the effectiveness of different types of financial aid in promoting student persistence and timely bachelor’s degree attainment. The findings of descriptive statistical and logistic regression analyses using the NCES Beginning Postsecondary Students (1990-94) data show that subsidized loans taken in the first year of college have a positive effect on persistence. The first-year distribution of aid does not close the income gap in bachelor’s degree attainment. Living on campus and first-year grade point average are the most important predictors of timely degree completion.

Schools in many countries are facing intense and elevated levels of criticism, with much debate over whether the criticism is merited. Much of the criticism embodies a view that things used to be better years ago, when schools were not prey to the many defects they are alleged to show today. Recollections of the past may hide a mixed reality. In this article, criticisms of education from 1957 are compared with contemporary criticisms. Some issues have remained important across forty years, while a few new issues have emerged. Criticisms of forty years ago centered on the dominance of "professional educationists," progressivism, the life adjustment movement, the waning "spirit of competition," lax discipline, the lack of emphasis on classical and modern foreign languages, avoidance of science and math, the neglect of gifted children, the lack of training of children in moral and spiritual values, and low academic standards. Today's debates introduce the allege...

School choice is the most controversial education policy issue of the 1990s. John Chubb and Terry Moe's Politics, Markets and America's Schools stimulated this investigation. They concluded that teacher and administrator autonomy was the most important influence on student achievement. They assumed that the organization of private schools offered greater autonomy resulting in higher student achievement and that the bureaucracy of public schools stifles autonomy limiting student achievement. The research undertaken here elaborates, elucidates, and fills in the framework of teacher and principal autonomy in public and private secondary schools. Interviews of more than thirty teachers and administrators in six high schools, observations, field notes, and analysis of documents collected in the field form the empirical base of this work. The sites included three private, independent, nondenominational secondary schools which are college preparatory and three public secondary scho...

Contemporary research on teaching indicates that teachers are powerful contributors to students’ academic achievement, though the set and interrelationships of characteristics that make for high-quality and effective teaching have yet to be satisfactorily determined. Nevertheless, on the basis of the extant research and a vision of exemplary teaching, the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards stipulated a definition of a superior teacher. The Board did this without empirical evidence to support their claim that teachers’ who meet the standards set by the Board were superior in promoting academic achievement to those who did not meet those standards. In the 17 years since the founding of the National Board, only a few empirical studies have addressed this important issue. In this study we compare the academic performance of students in the elementary classrooms of 35 National Board Certified teachers and their non-certified peers, in 14 Arizona school districts. Board Ce...

Critics of choice argue that it will allow alert and aggressive parents to get the best of everything for their children, leaving poor and minority children concentrated in the worst schools. (Note 1) But choice is not the only mechanism whereby this occurs. Alert and aggressive parents work the bureaucracy to get the best for their children. Thus, choice programs should be compared against the real performance of the current public education system, not its idealized aspirations.

Investment in educational technology has increased rapidly in recent years and many observers have begun to question whether, and how technology is being used as a teaching and learning tool. In order to address this issue, this research used survey data collected from 1,404 middle and high school teachers in 52 schools across 22 Massachusetts school districts to examine how technology is being used by upper grade teachers, and examines the school and district organizational characteristics that are associated with increased use of technology as a teaching and learning tool. Specifically, this research used hierarchical linear regression (HLM) techniques to model the teacher, school and district characteristics associated with five specific teacher uses of educational technology. This research found that both teacher and organizational characteristics were each found to be associated with the five technology uses, and characteristics varied in their ability to predict the five diffe...