PUBPOL 695/ED 697: Education Policy
(David K. Cohen)
Fall, 2005
-Last updated 12/13/05-
PUBPOL 695/ED 697 Syllabus (Updated 9/16/05)
I. COURSE AIMS.
This course explores current K-12 education policy, by considering a range of current policies that aim to improve schools in the U.S. These policies were devised at a key turning point in the history of U.S. public education: prior to the mid-1980s, education policy was chiefly concerned with the allocation and regulation of resource inputs to schools, but since then it has been increasingly concerned with the definition and regulation of school outcomes. All of the policy initiatives that we will consider express that turn toward outcomes, but each presents a different design to influence outcomes.
To explore that shift, and its consequences for policy and practice, is a central aim of the course. We will do so in several ways.
By investigating the design of outcomes-oriented policies. What are their guiding ideas, and how are the policies designed to carry those ideas into practice? What are the key differences among the guiding ideas and the designs?
By investigating the relations between policy and practice. What instruments does each policy deploy to influence teaching and learning? What effects does each have on teaching and learning? How can the observed effects be explained? What can be learned from comparing the educational requirements of these policies?
By investigating the relationships between government and policy. How does the structure of U.S. government influence education policy, and its implementation? How effective have state and local governments been in efforts to influence learning?
The sites for these investigations will include: (1) local school reform in Chicago and San Diego; (2) state standards-based reform in Texas; (3) federal school reform policy in No Child Left Behind; (4) charter schools in several states, and (5) several alternatives or supplements to policy, including KIPP Schools, Teach For America, The National Board For Professional Teaching Standards, and two Comprehensive School Reform Designs. These alternatives intervene directly on professionals' work, rather than trying to use government to improve school outcomes.
II. THE RECENT EVOLUTION OF EDUCATION POLICY.
GUIDING IDEAS OF PAST POLICY: For most of U.S. history, state and federal policies manipulated familiar resources: student attendance, money, curriculum, and teachers' qualifications. State school finance policies aimed to build a floor of minimum provision and to reduce inequalities in expenditures, to improve school quality. State teacher certification and licensing policies sought to insure that teachers were at least modestly qualified. The curriculum reforms of the late 1950s and early 1960s sought to create more engaging and intellectually serious curriculum materials. Federal desegregation efforts used judicial, legislative, and executive action to improve schooling for African-American students either by opening access to better schools or by improving schools in African-American neighborhoods. Title I of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act directed federal financial aid to schools that enrolled childen from poor families. State governments pressed schools to improve basic skills teaching in the 1970s.
These policies were quite consistent with the guiding ideas of education policy in the U.S. For most educators, parents, and policymakers assumed that conventional educational resources, such as money, curriculum materials, and facilities, and their regulation, influenced student outcomes. Many still seem to assume that, as they write about the "effects" of class size or expenditures on learning, which implies that resources carry "capacity." If so, learning would be influenced directly by such things as schools' stores of books, or teachers' degrees. Regulation has been thought to work by steering resources and thus capacity, within and among educational organizations, so that ability grouping or segregation would influence achievement by influencing access to resources. These assumptions made school improvement seem straightforward: allocate more resources or regulate schools' allocation of them.
ATTENTION TO OUTCOMES: Yet even as education policymaking intensified in the post- WW II eras, research began to focus attention on the outcomes of schooling, and on the relationships among resources, policy, and school outcomes. The Equality Of Educational Opportunity Survey (EEOS), done by James Coleman and several colleagues and published in 1966, was the first national survey of school resources and student achievement. The study was mandated by Title IV of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, to report on racial differences in public education, and it reported very large differences between the average test scores of advantaged and disadvantaged students, and between the average scores of African-American and Caucasian students. These differences were familiar to educators and some researchers, but school systems never made test results public. The report was big news, especially in the midst of the civil rights campaigns of the 1960s. This study combined with civil rights pressure for more equality to raise awareness of educational outcomes, and to put racial and class inequality on the public agenda.
It did so with an additional twist, for the study also probed the relationships among students' social background, their schools' resources, and their average school achievement. Contrary to what the authors (and nearly everyone else) expected, the study found that schools with more resources did not have higher student performance, once students' social background was taken into account. Differences among schools' libraries, teacher experience and education, expenditures, science labs, and other resources had weak or no associations with differences among school average student achievement. Despite large differences in average achievement among schools, and especially troubling differences between schools that enrolled the children of affluent and poor parents, differences in the educational resources that most people thought significant were weakly related to differences in student performance among schools. The most powerful predictors of school-to-school differences in average student performance were school average parents' educational and social backgrounds, in contrast to which, resources had trivial effects. Conventional resources did not have substantial associations with student performance, once students' social and economic background was taken into account.
This was often taken to mean that schools did not "make a difference", an idea that some conservatives embraced to attack liberal social policy, and that some liberals rejected to defend it. But the research was much more limited: it asked not whether schools made a difference, but whether some schools seemed to foster more learning than others, given knowledge of school average student social and educational background, and average resources. Contrary to decades of policy and broad public belief, researchers found that differences in schools' aggregate achievement were at best weakly related to differences in their aggregate resources.
The late 1960s and 1970s brought several other studies which found that conventional education policies had brought no significant change in student performance. These were taken to confirm the idea that schools made little difference to outcomes. The 1970s also brought another study -- Christopher Jencks et al's Inequality - which confirmed and amplified Coleman's results. Then the late 1970s and early 1980s brought the first cross-national studies of student performance, all of which reported that students in the U.S. did appreciably less well on common tests than students in several other developed nations.
OUTCOME-ORIENTED POLICY: These developments focused more public attention on school outcomes, and began to discredit the assumption that to invest in resources was to influence outcomes. Partly as a result, state and federal policy began to move away from allocating and regulating resource inputs, toward regulating instructional content, processes, and outcomes, in the 1980s. The most prominent policy of this sort was standards-based reform. By the late 1990s most states had introduced measures to change certain key technical and professional features of public education, including more detailed and demanding academic goals, explicit standards of student performance, assessment of students' academic performance against those standards, and schemes to hold schools or teachers accountable for students' performance.
These policies are conventional in the sense that they operate within the existing political economy of public education, but they are unconventional because they seek to regulate instruction. They represent an effort to turn the very decentralized U.S. system of schools, which has been marked by extraordinary autonomy for schools, teachers, and districts, into a system in which there are explicit and strong academic standards, in which those standards inform curriculum, assessments, and teaching, and in which accountability creates strong incentives for both educators and students to perform. Several of these state reforms have been operating for more than a decade, and there is sufficient evidence to begin to understand their operation and weigh their effects.
CHANGE THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF SCHOOLING: Several other reform policies - choice and decentralization -- are unconventional in a very different sense: they link school improvement to change in the political economy of schooling. The guiding ideas are that the school system's governance and fiscal structure are the central problem, rather than technical matters like standards, resources, and assessments. Chicago radically decentralized authority in its schools in the late 1980s, and put community school boards, occupied by elected parents, in charge. Reformers believed that the former highly centralized and bureaucratized system frustrated improvement, and that structural change in school government was required if schools were to improve. If decisions about education were informed by the concerns of those closest to students, teaching and learning would improve. School decentralization in Chicago is the most radical and sustained effort of the sort ever tried in the U.S: each school in the city has a governing board that can hire and fire principals, and has considerable authority to spend money as it sees fit. The reform has run for more than a decade, and there is sufficient evidence to enable us to explore its implementation and effects.
Other reformers seek to free schools from central and bureaucratic systems, either through voucher (family choice) schemes, or charter schools. One assumption behind both is that if the incentive structure of schooling is changed, by giving consumers choice among schools, that will compel schools to compete as they operate in markets, and instruction will improve. A large number of states now have charter school legislation, and the schools are increasing rapidly. Several experimental voucher programs are operating in at least one state and in several cities. Though evidence on these is more scarce, there is enough to begin to explore the implementation and effects of charter schools.
NON-GOVERNMENTAL INITIATIVES: Even more unconventional were non-governmental efforts to improve schooling and its outcomes, which multiplied at the same time as the government policies sketched above. For example, The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS), is a private organization which aims to use professional certification to make "...teaching a profession dedicated to student learning and to upholding high standards for professional performance." NBPTS is governed by a board on which teachers are a majority, and the organization spent its initial years creating standards for subject matter knowledge and pedagogy for a variety of subjects and grade levels. The standards "...detail what constitutes accomplished teaching in every subject and for students at all stages of their development ." NBPTS then devised proceedures to determine whether individual teachers could qualify to be certified by the board. The certification proceedures assess "...a teacher's practice against these high and rigorous standards. The process is an extensive series of performance-based assessments that includes teaching Portfolios, student work samples, videotapes and thorough analyses of the candidates' classroom teaching and student learning. Teachers also complete a series of written exercises that probe the depth of their subject-matter knowledge, as well as their understanding of how to teach those subjects to their students." By January, 2004, more than 32,000 teachers in the U.S. had qualified for NBPTS certification.
Comprehensive school reform (CSR) is a very different example of non-government approaches to school improvement. CSR rests on the idea that improving learning requires intervention in many aspects of schools, including teaching, curriculum, organization, leadership, and other things. The first comprehensive school reform design was created by Success For ALL (SFA) in a few elementary schools in Baltimore, in the late 1980s, but the New American Schools Corporation (NAS), sponsored many more. NAS was created by business leaders in response to a proposal by President George H.W. Bush, in 1991. NAS collected more than $130 million from businesses, foundations, and the federal government, and staged a national competition for the most effective, evidence-based school improvement strategies.
Eleven designs were selected from more than 600 proposals, and each design team received grants from NAS to fully develop its model. All of the teams are private organizations devoted exclusively to school improvement, and all focus on improving high-poverty schools. They operate on a combination of foundation grants and fees paid by implementing schools; typically the fees are paid from Title I and related state program funds. Most of the teams have been at work, implementing their designs in schools, for roughly a decade, and NAS's recent estimate is that CSRD designs are operating in more than 4,000 schools.
CONCLUSION: The recent history of education policy has seen extraordinary change. Though policymakers at all levels of government are still concerned with resource allocation, the policies that now occupy the center of the educational stage are concerned with the defintion and regulation of school outcomes. Previously, the central problems of policymaking were to identify the important resources and allocate them to school systems and schools. The first of those problems was solved by common sense and professional judgement: money, books in the library, the quality of physical facilities, and teachers' education were the main indicia of quality. Yet those assumptions began to dissolve when research seemed to show that the relationships between such resources and students' learning were weak.
That sea change in ideas helped to shift policymakers' attention to outcomes, but outcomes oriented policies are unlikely to work unless policymakers can solve some imposing puzzles. For one thing, they would have to identify the things that will influence the quality of work in classroms. That requires unprecedented knowledge of educational processes, knowledge that presently is quite modest. For another, they would have to embody those influences in policy instruments, and deploy them. That requires extensive knowledge of the relations between policy and practice in education, knowledge that also is only modestly developed. Finally, they would have to take steps to insure that school systems and schools would make effective use of the new instruments, which requires extensive knowledge of the culture, organization and management of state and local school systems, and schools. That requires unprecended knowledge of schools as organizations, which also is quite modestly developed. Solving these problems is the central challenge of current education policy.
III. COURSE REQUIREMENTS AND EVALUATION CRITERIA.
My evaluation of class members' work will focus on class discussion, written work, and use of the readings in both. All assignments are due when indicated, with no incompletes or extensions. Barring medical emergencies, late papers will get no credit.
Writing: There will be two papers, each 4-5 typed, single-spaced pages. I expect members of the class to make sound arguments, to write clear, well organized papers, and to appropriately use evidence and analysis from the readings. Competent but pedestrian work passes. Thoughtful and imaginative analysis gets higher marks. The papers will count for 70% of the final grade.
Class work: The weekly assignments below include required readings and discussion questions. Most classes will consist of discussion of the issues set out in the assignments, below, and the reading. I expect your comments to be referenced to the readings, and to use the readings effectively. Voicing opinions without a basis in and reference to the readings is not productive, and will not help anyone. I expect each member of the class to bring copies of the relevant of the readings to class, so we can refer to them readily.
Most classes will center on analysis of the readings, in light of the discussion questions. I will make some comments, but there will be few lectures. Active work on specific issues of analysis offers members of the class more opportunities to learn than listening to lectures. It also offers me more opportunities to learn about your ideas, and to adjust instruction accordingly.
I expect each member of the class to have well prepared answers to the discussion questions, and able to identify and respond to likely objections. We will begin each class by listening to at least several of these answers and responses, and then will discuss the objections and ensuing points. Members of the class should be well prepared, for contributions to the class discussions will count for 30% of the course grade. My criteria for judging these contributions are like those for written work: clear arguments, the use of evidence from the readings (or elsewhere), and clear, well-organized speech. I place the same premium on thoughtful analysis in class as in the papers.
IV. COMMUNICATION.
The best way to reach me is e-mail. My address is: dkcohen@umich.edu I have a great deal of electronic mail, so please be judicious. My office phone is 763-0226, which my assistant, Ms. Terri Ridenour, answers. Her direct-dial number is 647-7449.
Office hours are by appointment. I keep my own calendar, the best time is Thursday afternoons, after class, or, failing that, Tuesday afternoons.
V. COURSE SCHEDULE, READING, AND ASSIGNMENTS.
All readings are available on this course website and are for public use. You should download them to your computers, or print them, or both. However you save and read them, each member of the class must bring copies of the readings to class. The classroom has wireless connection.
PART I: BIG-CITY SCHOOL REFORM POLICIES
This segment of the course focuses on school reform policies in Chicago and San Diego, two of the ten largest cities in the U.S. Though there are some similarities between the cities, the policies differed quite dramatically. The contrasts between the reform programs will help to illuminate their guiding ideas and designs.
Sept 8 (week 1): Overview of the course, and background on the San Diego and Chicago policies.
After discussion of the syllabus, I will hand out two selections that will introduce the two big-city reforms. You will have 45 minutes to read them, and prepare responses to the queries just below. We will then spend the rest of the class discussing your answers. The selections are:
1. Hess, Jr., G. Alfred (1991). School Restructuring, Chicago Style . Corwin Press, Inc. "The Chicago Restructuring Plan: P.A. 85-1418" (p. 105 -119).
2. Hightower, Amy, "San Diego's Big Boom...." Center For The Study of Teaching and Policy, Seattle, Washington, January 2002, pp. 6-15.
Discussion question : What assumptions were made about what was wrong with the schools in Chicago? In San Diego? What was thought to be needed to make the schools work more effectively in each city?
We will spend the remainder of the first class discussing your answers. One purpose is to begin to begin to become familiar with the two cases, and another is to begin to consider what might connect policy and practice.
Sept 15 (week 2): Initial Responses to Reform
Discussion questions : What were the key instruments of the two reform policies? How did the Chicago elementary schools' respond to the policy? Did the responses conform to the assumptions that reformers made about school improvement?
3. Hess, G. A., "School Restructuring Chicago Style: A Midway Report" (1992). pp 1-26.
4. Consortium on Chicago School Research, A View from The Elementary Schools: The State of Reform in Chicago (1993). All.
5. Consortium on Chicago School Research, Chicago Teachers Take Stock (1995). pp. 30-46, 50-67.
6. Darling-Hammond, L., Hightower, A., et al., "Building Instructional Quality: "Inside Out" and "Outside In"..." Center For The Study of Teaching and Policy, Seattle, Washington, September 2003, pp. 7-25.
Sept 22 (week 3): The effects of reform. (1)
Discussion questions: What sorts of academic improvement can be observed in the two school systems? What explains the results?
7. Bryk, et al., Academic Productivity of Chicago Public Elementary Schools (1998). Consortium on Chicago School Research. All.
8. Consortium on Chicago School Research. Quality of Intellectual Work (1998). All.
9. M. Roderick et. al., Ending Social Promotion: The Effects Of Summer Bridge. Consortium on Chicago School Research. All.
10. Darling-Hammond, L., Hightower, A., et al., "Building Instructional Quality: "Inside Out" and "Outside In"..." Center For The Study of Teaching and Policy, Seattle, Washington, September 2003, pp. 25-47.
CLASS NOTES 9/22/05
Sept 29 (week 4): The Effects of Reform. (2)
Discussion questions : What were the key changes in Chicago reform policy? How do the new initiatives compare with the San Diego reform? What effects do the changes seem to have had?
11. Shipps, D., "Pulling Together: Civic Capacity and Urban School Reform", American Educational Research Journal; Winter 2003; Vol. 40, No. 4, p 860-871.
12. Hess, G. Alfred, "Accountability and Support in Chicago: Consequences For Students," pp. 339-87, in Ravitch, D., Brookings Papers on Education Policy 2002. Washington, The Brookings Institution, 2002. All.
13. Finnigan, Kara & O'Day, Jennifer (July, 2003) External support to schools on probation: Getting a leg up? Consortium for Policy Research in Education. All.
14. J. Nakagoa & M. Roderick, Ending Social Promotion: The Effects Of Retention. Consortium on Chicago School Research. All.
14 a. Quick, H., Birman, B., et al "Evaluation of the Blueprint for Student Success in a Standards-Based System: Year 2 Interim Report, Palo Alto, CA, American Institutes of Research, July, 2003. Read Chapter 2, pp. 30-36 (Summary).
14 b. Darling-Hammond, L., Hightower, A., et al., "Building Instructional Quality: "Inside Out" and "Outside In"..." Center For The Study of Teaching and Policy, Seattle, Washington, September 2003, pp. 52-57.
PART II: STANDARDS-BASED REFORM
Oct 6 (week 5): Policy Theory and Texas Practice
Discussion questions: What are the key elements in the design of standards-based reform? Of the reform in Texas? What instruments did the Texas government deploy? How do these compare with the instruments that the four successful districts deployed?
15. Marshall Smith and Jennifer O'Day, "Systemic School Reform" All.
16. Texas Education Agency, "Introduction To The Texas Accountability System." All.
17. Skrla, Scheurich, and Johnson, (9/2000). Equity-Driven Achievement-Focused School Districts: A report on School Success In Four Texas School Districts... (pp 7-39) Austin: Dana Center.
18. Julie Stewart and Barbara Neufeld, Standards-Based Reform in Corpus Christi Independent School District . Education Matters, 1/99 Corpus Christie and update 8/30/99.
CLASS NOTES 10/7/05
Oct 13: (week 6): Implementation and Effects of the Texas Reform. (1)
Discussion questions: What have been the effects of the Texas reforms? What explains these effects?
19. T.H. Linton & D. Kester, "Exploring the Achievement Gap Between White and Minority Students in Texas: A Comparison of the 1996 and 2000 NAEP and TAAS Eighth Grade Mathematics Test Results" EPAA, Vol 11, no 10, March 14, 2003. All.
20. Schemo, D.J., Houston Dropout Audit, "Questions on Data Cloud Luster Of Houston Schools", NYTimes, July 11, 2003.
21. Robert Kimball, "Face Up To Dropout Reality" Houston Chronicle, Sept 13, 2003.
22. Diana Jean Schemo, "State to Monitor Houston Schools To Ensure Reporting of Dropouts", NYTimes, Aug 8. 2003.
23. Craig Jerald, "Real Results, Remaining Challenges: The Story of Texas Education Reform", The Business Round Table and The Education Trust. All.
Oct 20 (week 7): Implementation and Effects of the Texas Reform. (2)
Discussion question: What have been the effects of the Texas reforms? What explains these effects?
24. M. Carnoy and S. Loeb, " Does External Accountability Affect Student Outcomes? A Cross-State Analysis, EEPA article. All.
25. L.A. Toenjes and A.G. Dworkin "Are Increasing Test Scores in Texas Really a Myth, or is Haney's Myth a Myth?" All.
CLASS NOTES 10/20/05
Oct 27 (week 8): Federal Standards-Based Reform: No Child Left Behind.
Discussion questions: What policy instruments does NCLB deploy to improve schooling for disadvantaged students? How are the patterns found in readings # 28, 29, and 30 likely to influence implementation?
26. U.S. Congress, No Child Left Behind (NCLB excerpts).
27. Education Commission of The States, No State Left Behind (pp. 3-33).
28. National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) "Introduction" to 1998 report; Figure 5.5 ("Percentage of grade 4 students...."), and Table 5.7 (Average grade 4 scale scores and....").
29. U. S. Department of Education, NCES. Table 11.--Educational attainment of persons 18 years old and over, by state: 1990 to 1998, and Table 20.--Household income and poverty rates, by state: 1990 and 1997-98
30. Carey, K., "The Funding Gap 2004". Washington, D.C. The Education Trust
(pp.1-10).
CLASS NOTES 10/27/05
Nov 3 (week 9): Federal Standards-Based Reform and Teacher Quality.
Discussion Questions: What effects have the teacher quality provisions of NCLB had? What effects are they likely to have? What effects have the accountability provisions had? What further effects can be anticipated?
31. Center On Education Policy, From The Capital To The Classroom: Year Three of the No Child Left Behind Act (chapters 1,2,3 and 6).
32. Lankford, H., Loeb, S. and Wycoff, J., "Teacher Sorting and the Plight of Urban Schools...", Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis , Spring 2002, Vol. 24, No 1. (All).
33. U.S. Congress, No Child Left Behind, Title II selections (Read sections 2101, 2112 (a) and (b) 2113 and 2121, 2122, 2123 and 2141 closely).
34. Kevin Carey, et. al., Telling the Whole Truth (or Not) About Highly Qualified Teachers , Washington, D.C., 2003. (All).
35. New York Times story (10/20/05) about recent NAEP scores and NCLB.
CLASS NOTES 11/3/05
Nov 10 (week 10): Charter schools.
Discussion questions: What are the arguments for charter schools? What is the evidence on their effectiveness?
36. Gill, et. al., Rhetoric vs. Reality: What We Know and What We Need To Know About Vouchers and Charter Schools , Santa Monica CA: The RAND Corporation, 2001, Chapter 1.
37. Zimmer, et.al., Charter School Operations And Performance In California , Santa Monica, CA: RAND, Introduction and Chapter 2.
38. Carnoy et. al. The Charter School Dust-Up , New York: Economic Policy Institute and Teachers College Press, 2005. Chapter 5. (We ordered copies of this book)
CLASS NOTES 11/10/05
Nov 17 (week 11): Non-policy Approaches to School Improvement: The National Board For Professional Teaching Standards.
Discussion question: What is the NBPTS strategy for improving education? How does it compare with those strategies that center on government policy? Has it been successful?
39. Humphrey, Koppich, and Hough, "Sharing The Wealth: National Board Certified Teachers and Then Students Who Need Them The Most" EPAA, Vol 13, No 18 March 3, 2005.
40. Goldhaber, D., and Anthony, E, "Can Teacher Quality Be Effectively Assessed?"
41. National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (2004). Why America Needs National Board Certified Teachers.
42. National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (2004). What Teachers Should Know and Be Able to Do: The Five Core Propositions of the National Board.
CLASS NOTES 11/17/05
Dec 1 (week 12): Non-policy Approaches to School Improvement: Comprehensive School Reform (CSR) designs. Success For All (SFA) and America's Choice (AC).
Discussion question: What are the SFA and AC strategies for improving education? How does it compare with those strategies that center on government policy? Have they been successful?
43. Robert Slavin and Nancy Madden, "One Million Children: Success For All"
44. Donald Peurach, Designing and Managing Comprehensive School Reform: The Case of Success For All (Ph.D. Dissertation, U of M, 2005. Prologue.)
45. Jonathan A. Supovitz, Susan M. Poglinco, & Brooke A. Snyder, "Moving Mountains: Successes and Challenges of the America's Choice Comprehensive School Reform Design" , Read Exec summary: iii, Introduction: p. 1, Design Description: p. 3, Implementation: 5-11, Workshops: 13-18, Professional Development, 21-24, Leadership: 25-28.
Second Paper: The topic will be sent under separate cover, after the last class. Papers are due on or before Dec 18.
Dec 8 (week 13, last class): Summing up: Problems of Policy and Practice.
Discussion question:
One commentator offered this view of the issues discussed in this course:
"A central problem for current education policy is that the local schools and school systems that are in need of improvement also are the key agents of that improvement. They are both the problem and the main problem-solver. Can policy enable schools and school systems to turn themselves into the solution? And what would we take to be a reasonable solution?
"There is some evidence that some local systems have made significant improvements, but local systems are vulnerable to political and economic pressures in their environments, and there are political risks in pressing for ambitious improvement. For as local policymakers devise more ambitious reforms, the more the costs of reform rise, and the more likely that the policies will encounter conflict and resistance. In addition, local systems are just that - local - and changes made in San Diego have no effect in Los Angeles or Oakland.
"State and federal governments are less volatile than localities, and they have broader coverage. State policies can require change and offer resources to help, and it seems clear that several states have made at least modest progress in efforts to improve high-poverty schools. But these policies only are effective if local schools and school systems make good use of the requirements and resources, and state governments have had very modest capability, and can offer only limited assistance.
"Similarly, external agencies like NBPTS can educate more capable teachers, and comprehensive school reforms like Success For All and America's Choice can offer improved designs for schooling, but they too will only be effective if the local schools and school systems that are the problem make good use of them."
We will discuss this commentary in the last class (coffee, fruit, and muffins will be provided to fuel your work on this task). You should come to class prepared to offer your considered views about:
(1) whether and in what ways you think the analysis is correct or flawed;
(2) what, if anything, your own analysis implies for possible changes in education policy, and
(3) what your own analysis implies for what can be expected from education policy?
Reading:
46. David K. Cohen, Susan L. Moffitt, and Simona Goldin, "Policy and Practice". (read all)
CLASS NOTES 12/8/05
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SUPPLEMENTARY READINGS FOR COURSE
Elmore, R. & Burney, D. (October, 1997). School Variation and Systemic Instructional Improvement in Community School District #2, New York City.
Elmore, R. & Burney, D. (December, 1998). Continuous Improvement in Community District #2, New York City.