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Improving Student Achievement

United States. Congress. House. Committee on Education and the Workforce. Subcommittee on Postsecondary Education, Training, and Life-long Learning

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 154


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This book examines issues and questions surrounding student achievement, combining research with practice to present an overview of current efforts to foster student learning in the United States at local, state, and national levels. Following the preface and introduction, which stress the importance of focusing on students, chapter 1 examines the various factors in defining achievement. An informal survey of school administrators indicates that most view achievement as a multidimensional, continuous, and holistic reflection of the child. Chapter 2 offers guidelines to actualize achievement, which involve energizing teaching, meeting the needs of disadvantaged children, and setting high expectations. The Transition School Project in Spokane, Washington, is set forth as an example of an effective achievement program. The third chapter examines factors that stifle achievement and focuses on stimulating student motivation. Examples of state and national level efforts are described in chapter 4. The fifth chapter discusses alternative ways to measure student achievement, and chapter 6 outlines the importance of leadership in reaching teachers, staff, and parents. A glossary is included. (Contains 48 references.) (LMI)
Across three papers, I reevaluate the roles that teacher quality and court-ordered school finance reform have in improving student achievement. In the first paper, I examine the extent to which teachers have longer-term effects on student achievement using administrative data from Miami-Dade County Public Schools (MDCPS). I define longer-term effects as the effects teachers have on student achievement in the years after they teach their students. Using a flexible statistical model, I obtain teacher-specific short-term and longer-term effects. I also estimate the extent to which short-term and longer-term effects relate to one another, on average. Results suggest that there is meaningful variation in teacher longer-term effects. I also find that short-term and longer-term effects are not perfectly correlated with each other. Finally, I find that having a master's degree or Ph. D. is associated with higher longer-term effects when estimating the model for math teachers. In the second paper, I assess the validity and stability of short-term and longer-term teacher effect estimates. I assess validity by examining whether future teachers predict the past test score gains of students they have not yet taught. This particular test is designed to provide evidence of student sorting bias that could potentially invalidate the teacher effect estimates. I then assess the stability of teacher effect estimates by considering the stability of teacher effects across different cohorts of students and the stability of teacher effects across math and English language arts within a given cohort of students. Results show that teacher effect estimates suffer from sorting bias. Although this is problematic, it suggests the need to understand whether the sorting bias is large enough to invalidate teacher effect estimates; this is an area of future research. With respect to stability, there is substantive overlap of teacher effects--both short-term and longer-term--across student cohorts, which suggests that the estimates carry some true signal of teacher quality and are reliable. Overlap of teacher effects across subjects is also non-trivial, but it is less stable the across cohort stability. These results suggest that teachers have different strengths in different subjects. In the third paper, Kenneth Shores and I provide new evidence about the effect of court-ordered finance reform on per-pupil revenues and graduation rates. We account for cross-sectional dependence and heterogeneity in the treated and counterfactual groups to estimate the effect of overturning a state's finance system. Seven years after reform, the highest poverty quartile in a treated state experienced a 4 to 12 percent increase in per-pupil spending and a 5 to 8 percentage point increase in graduation rates. We subject the model to various sensitivity tests. In most cases, point estimates for graduation rates are within 2 percentage points of our preferred model.

A Failure of Initiative

United States. Congress. House. Select Bipartisan Committee to Investigate the Preparation for and Response to Hurricane Katrina

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 588


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This report assesses domestic political support for internationalist foreign policy by analyzing the motivations of members of Congress on key foreign policy issues. It includes case studies on major foreign policy debates in recent years, including the use of force, foreign aid, trade policy and U.S.-Russia relations. It also develops a new series of archetypes for describing the foreign policy worldviews of members of the 115th Congress to replace the current stale and unsophisticated labels of internationalist, isolationist, hawk and dove. Report findings emphasize areas of bipartisan cooperation on foreign policy issues given member ideologies.