Browsing by Subject "Education policy"
Now showing 1 - 11 of 11
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item DATE as a human capital strategy(2013-05) Volonnino, Michael Robert; Reyes, Pedro, 1954-Performance incentives in education has frequently been presented in purely rational choice economic terms, looking to see if the input of an incentive produced the desired output of student achievement. Such research has continually failed to produce significant effects. This dissertation attempts to recast incentives in terms of human capital theory and human behavioral economics, looking at the impact of social capital and support structures on teacher response to incentives. This study examines a major performance pay program in Texas using a concurrent-nested, mixed methods design. It finds that an external motivator like incentives is only effective in the presence of factors of internal motivation and that social capital positively affects the impact of a performance incentive.Item Does strategic human capital management impact teacher mobility and student achievement? Evidence from three years of implementation in one Texas school district(2012-05) Barkowski, Elizabeth Ann, 1980-; Lincove, Jane Arnold; Reyes, Pedro, 1954-; Heilig, Julian; Saenz, Victor; Treisman, UriMany public school districts around the nation have implemented performance pay programs to provide teachers the opportunity to earn additional pay based on measures of student achievement. These programs aim to improve student achievement and teacher effectiveness. Existing research on performance pay demonstrates no positive impact of such programs on student and teacher outcomes; however, little research assesses the impact of performance pay combined with addition supports and working condition improvements on student achievement and teacher effectiveness. This study empirically examined the impact of teacher performance pay combined with additional human capital improvements on student growth and teacher mobility in one Texas school district. The district implemented the program in only 15 of the district’s 144 schools. Nine schools implemented the full intervention, which included performance pay, teacher supports, and working condition improvements, while six schools partially implemented the program, offering teachers the opportunity to earn performance pay only. Results demonstrate that student growth was significantly, positively related to full program implementation in math and reading; yet, the magnitude of the results was small. Over time, teacher effectiveness increased on campuses that implemented the most comprehensive version of the program. Average teacher turnover rates increased on full program campuses the year before and the year after implementation; yet, the most effective teachers remained on campuses that provided performance pay and improved working conditions. Results suggest that financial incentives combined with additional human capital improvements, rather than financial incentives alone, could lead to small improvements in student achievement and teacher effectiveness in high need, urban public schools. These findings hold implications for policymakers and researchers, providing evidence on how to best design and implement school district human capital initiatives that show promise in improving student and teacher outcomes.Item Equality of educational opportunity between low-income and well-off students : school and family inputs in two national cohorts of high school students(2015-08) Holas, Igor; Gershoff, Elizabeth T.; von Hippel, Paul T.; Huston, Aletha C; Crosnoe, Robert; Benner, Aprile DWhy do low-income students achieve lower test scores and attain less education than their better off peers? Can we close these gaps through redistribution of school funds? Fifty years ago the Coleman Report (Coleman et al., 1966) suggested that school resources had surprisingly little to do with these achievement gaps, and that school segregation, along with family background, were the primary drivers. In this dissertation I present two studies on two nationally representative cohorts of high school students (high school class of 1992 and 2004). In Study 1, I describe the differences between low- income and well-off students’ families (income, structure, home-language, and parental education), school resources (class size and teacher salary), student body characteristics, school and family interpersonal processes, and finally educational outcomes (test scores and attainment). In Study 2, I pursue a structural model to determine whether school resources or family characteristics relate more strongly to students’ outcomes, and to identify the mechanisms of influence. In both studies I explore changes in these relations for the two cohorts. Results from Study 1 indicate that low-income students differ from well off students on their family characteristics, characteristics of peers in school, and outcomes, but differences are slight on school funding or resources. Findings from Study 2 indicate that family background and school segregation relate the strongest to students’ outcomes with school funding and resources showing only weak relations.Item Falling through the cracks : community based programs fill in the gaps that school discipline leaves behind(2014-05) Asase, Dagny Adjoa; Dahlby, Tracy; Minutaglio, BillThe purpose of this report is to focus on the school-to-prison pipeline and the need to intervene with school discipline that pushes students out of the classroom and into the criminal justice system. It showcases services and programs in Austin, Texas, including Southwest Keys, Webb Youth Court, and Council on At-Risk Youth as examples for solutions. The report also incorporates research and expert advice on the safety and wellbeing of students while advocating a need to change the policies and culture surrounding schools.Item The literacy ecology of a middle school classroom : teaching and writing amid influence and tension(2013-08) David, Ann Dubay; Bomer, Randy; Skerrett, AllisonThis embedded case study of an eighth-grade English language arts reading classroom employed an ecological perspective based on Ecological Systems Theory (EST) to examine the ways in which a myriad influences, often conflicting and originating in a variety of settings external to the classroom, intersected in that classroom. The findings from this research point toward the reality of literacy classrooms buffeted by conflicting Discourses around writing that originate in official school structures, as well as the difficulty students and teachers have navigating the tensions created by those conflicts. The focal teacher for this study, a master teacher, navigated these conflicting discourses by being thoughtfully adaptive and balancing policy mandates with her own knowledge of and beliefs about literacy instruction, though she often made instructional decisions at odds with her knowledge and beliefs because she feared lack of compliance with administrative or district mandates risked her job. In this contested atmosphere, the teacher supported students in navigating the myriad literacy practices within the classroom, and the literacy practices from their lives outside of school, using writer's notebooks. These notebooks served as boundary objects because they incorporated a variety of influences and Discourses in a single tool. Even in creating a robust literacy ecology in her classroom through the use of writer's notebooks, thoughtfully adapting to the myriad policy mandates, and having departmental and professional support for her work, she left the school at the end of the year because she could not be the type of teacher she wanted to be in that school. The broader implication of her decision, and the research more generally, is that classrooms are not isolated from the settings within which they are embedded, and those settings often influence the classroom in ways that conflict and create tensions. Teachers and students, then, must make decisions about how to navigate those tensions, often at odds with their knowledge or beliefs. These conflicts and tensions within a classroom can be reduced, or mitigated through communicating, building trust, working toward consensus, and avoiding exercises of power.Item Measuring Head Start across states(2011-05) Clark, Constance Margarete; Jones, Bryan D.; Shaw, DaronThis paper examines various ways Head Start has been measured across states. The contribution to the literature is to look at new variables, the role they play, and the contribution they make to measuring the effectiveness and enrollment numbers of Head Start Programs across states.Item The process of becoming : the political construction of Texas’ Lone STAAR system of Accountability and College Readiness(2012-08) López, Patricia Dorene; Valenzuela, AngelaAs systems of accountability and efficiency continue to permeate public education institutions it is important that research engage the various factors that embody how these systems come to be, whose knowledge gains access to informing their designs, and whose interests are served. Texas has long been recognized as a testing ground for such policy designs, although researchers’ points of departure on such systems have solely focused on the outcomes of these policies in practice. Research on the political construction and discourses that define the underlying goals of these systems continue to be ignored by researchers. Analyses of Texas-inspired federal policies have also predominantly taken an outcomes-based approach, or at most have had episodic engagements with political processes peering down from the balcony to observe the interaction of the obvious actors. To this end, this three-year ethnographic study conceptually and methodologically engages the various dimensions—such as race, class, history, interest, power, and agency—that embody the political lineage of Texas’ new system of Accountability and College Readiness across various contexts. This study further contributes to the dearth of literature that examines the role of research and university researchers in policy debates, and the limits and possibilities of politically engaged scholars in such processes.Item A quantitative analysis of the production, selection, and career paths of Texas public school administrators(2012-08) Davis, Bradley Walter; Gooden, Mark A.; Cantu, Norma V; Feng, Li; O'Doherty, Ann; Powers, Daniel A; Young, Michelle D; Reyes, PedroUsing state-wide, longitudinal data on Texas public school educators employed between the 1991-1991 and 2010-2011 school years, this study explores the disproportionate selection of campus leaders based on ethnicity and gender. Through a combination of descriptive and inferential techniques, this study illustrates how trends in the production, selection, and career paths of administratively-certified educators at the various intersections of ethnicity and gender have changed over time. Controlling for a variety of individual work history and campus characteristics, this study also explores how an administratively-certified educator’s ethnicity and gender affect their probability of procuring a campus leadership position.Item Randomized controlled trials to evaluate impact : their challenges and policy implications for medicine, education, and international development(2012-12) Kahlert, Rahel C.; Ward, Peter M., 1951-; Treisman, Uri; Galbraith, James; Osborne, Cynthia; Roberts, BryanPolicy makers in education and international development have lately gravitated toward the randomized controlled trial (RCT)—an evaluation design that randomly assigns a sample of people or households into an intervention group and a control group in order to measure the differential effect of the intervention—as a means to determine program impact. As part of federal regulations, the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Agency for International development explicitly declared a preference for the RCT. When advocating for adopting the RCT model as the preferred evaluation tool, policy makers point to the success story of medical trials and how they revolutionized medicine from Medieval charlatanry to a modern life-saving discipline. By presenting a more nuanced account of the role of the RCT in medical history, however, this study finds that landmark RCTs were accompanied with challenges, Evidence-Based Medicine had rightful critics, and opportunistic biases in drug trials apply equally to education policy and international development. This study also examines the recent privileged role of the RCT in education and international development, concluding that its initial promise was not entirely born out when put into practice, as the national Reading First Initiative exemplifies. From a comparative perspective, the RCT movements also encountered major RCT critics, whose voices were not initially heard. These voices, however, seem to have contributed to a swing of the pendulum away from RCT primacy back towards greater methodological pluralism. A major conclusion of this study is that policy makers should exercise great caution when using RCTs as a policy evaluation tool. This conclusion is arrived at via considering RCT biases, challenges, and limited generalizability; understanding its interpretive-qualitative components; and broadening the overall methodological repertoire to better enable evaluations of macro-policy interventions.Item (Re)framing the politics of educational discourse : an investigation of the Title I School Improvement Grant program of 2009(2011-05) Carpenter, Bradley Wayne; Young, Michelle D.; Holme, Jennifer J.; Gooden, Mark A.; Reddick, Richard J.; Scribner, Jay D.; Gregg, Benjamin G.Of the numerous public policy debates currently taking place throughout the United States, perhaps no issue receives more attention than the persistence of “chronically” low-performing public schools. As of 2009, approximately 5,000 schools—5% of the nation’s total—qualified as chronically low performing (Duncan, 2009d). Certainly, these statistics merit the attention of policy scholars, yet the political contestation of interests attempting to influence how the federal government should address such issues has reached a new fevered crescendo. Given the increased politicization of the federal government’s role in education and the growing number of interests attempting to influence the debates concerning school reform, education policy scholars have recognized the need to extend the field of policy studies by using analytical frameworks that consider both the discourse and performative dimensions of deliberative policy making. Therefore, this study addresses this particular need by employing a critical interpretive policy analysis that illustrates how both dominant discourses and the deliberative performances of the federal government shaped the policy vocabularies embedded within the Title I School Improvement Grant program of 2009 as the commonsense solutions for the nation’s chronically low-performing schools. In addition, this study provides a historical analysis, illustrating how the omnipresent threat of an economic crisis has been a primary influence in the politics of federal governance since the global economic collapse of the 1970s. This study demonstrates how over the course of the last four decades the United States has consistently reduced its commitment to the public sector, choosing instead to promote economic policies informed by the ideals of market-based liberalism. Subsequently, this study presents the argument that education, specifically the “chronic failure” of public schools, has emerged as a “primary emblematic issue” (Hajer, 1995) and now serves as an “effective metaphor for the nation’s economic crisis.” Thus, with such issues presented as a contextual backdrop, this study examines how the Obama/Duncan Administration operationalized dominant discourses and performative practices to establish consensual support for a turnaround reform agenda, effectively defining the policy solutions made available to those who participated in the revision of the Title I SIG program of 2009.Item School social workers’ perceptions of the impact of high-stakes accountability testing in schools(2011-08) Riordan, Christine Lagana; Franklin, Cynthia; Aguilar, Jemel; Harris, Mary Beth; Reyes, Pedro; Streeter, CalvinAfrican American and Hispanic students and students from families with lower income are particularly at-risk for differential academic achievement and dropout. When students underachieve at school or dropout, they often face severe consequences such as increased risk of incarceration and unemployment. School social workers strive to prevent poor academic achievement and the associated negative outcomes. In recent years, federal and state education policy has focused on reducing disparities in academic achievement through the creation of policies that use high-stakes testing requirements to hold schools accountable for student learning. Research studies on teacher perceptions of high-stakes testing indicate that it is having a negative impact on their job tasks and on school systems. However, there are few studies that examine school social worker perceptions about the impact of high-stakes testing. This study examines school social workers’ perceptions about high-stakes testing. Specifically, it assesses school social worker perceptions about the impact of high-stakes testing on school systems and how school ratings and student performance might influence these perceptions. It also examines school social workers’ perceptions about the impact of high-stakes testing on their abilities to perform their work tasks. The study sample is drawn from respondents to the Texas School Social Work Survey (n=177). Data were analyzed through secondary data analysis using factor analysis and structural equation modeling (SEM). Findings indicate that school social workers perceive high-stakes testing as having a largely negative impact on school systems and their job tasks. School social workers who predominantly worked with students from ethnic minority backgrounds were more likely to have negative opinions about the impact of high-stakes testing on their job tasks. School social workers from schools with lower school ratings and those who felt that the students on their caseload tended to struggle on high-stakes tests had more negative perceptions about the impact of high-stakes testing on school systems. Results indicate the need for school social workers to become more involved in education policy and macro practice, to connect their services to improved academic outcomes for students, and to find new ways to provide school social work services in the “age of accountability.”