Marcus A. Winters

University of Colorado Colorado Springs | UCCS · Department of Leadership Research and Foundations

In recent years, the number of charter schools in Florida has doubled. We examine five years of data on students moving into these schools from the traditional public sector. We consider student attributes and the school and district contexts that they are leaving. The better students are performing relative to their peers, the less likely they are...

Several states have recently adopted or are pursuing policies that deny or revoke tenure from teachers who receive poor evaluation ratings over time based in part on quantitative measures of performance. Using data from the state of Florida, we estimate such value-added measures to consider the future effectiveness and number of teachers who would...

In this paper, we consider several features of teacher-retention policies based on value-added measures of effectiveness under a variety of empirically grounded rules and parameters. We consider the effects of policy design by varying the standard above which satisfactory teachers are expected to perform. We simulate recently adopted policies that...

We analyze patterns of teacher attrition from charter schools and schools in the traditional public sector. Using rich data on students, teachers, and schools in Florida, we estimate teacher effectiveness based on repeated test scores reported at the student level for each teacher over time. Among all teachers, those in charter schools appear more...

This article uses a regression discontinuity approach to study the influence of New York City’s school grading policy on student math and English language arts (ELA) achievement. We find evidence that students in schools receiving a failing grade realized positive effects in English in the 1st year of sanction, but we find no statistically signific...

We use a regression discontinuity strategy to produce causal estimates for the effect of remediation under Florida’s test-based promotion policy on multiple outcomes for up to five years after the intervention. Students subjected to the policy were retained in the third grade, were required to be assigned to a high-quality teacher during the retain...

This paper uses student level data from New York City to study the relationship between a public school losing enrollment to charter school competitors and the academic achievement of students who remain enrolled in it. Geographic measures most often used to study the effect of school choice policies on public school student achievement are not wel...

We measure the impact of observed teacher characteristics on student math and reading proficiency using a rich dataset from Florida. We expand upon prior work by accounting directly for nonrandom attrition of teachers from the classroom in a sample selection framework. We find evidence that sample selection is present in the estimation of the influ...

The authors expand on research evaluating public school response to school choice policies by considering the particular influence of voucher programs for disabled students—a growing type of choice program that may have different implications for public school systems from those of more conventional choice programs. The authors provide a theoretica...

An important criticism of high-stakes testing policies - policies that reward or sanction schools based on their students' performance on standardized tests - is that they provide schools with an incentive to focus on those subjects that play a role in the accountability system while decreasing attention to those subjects that are not part of the p...

We evaluate the impact of Florida's test-based promotion policy on the probability that low-performing students are retained using data on the universe of third-grade students in the state of Florida from 2001 to 2004. We also examine the effect of formal exemptions to the policy on student proficiency in reading two years later. In an evaluation o...

Paying teachers varying amounts on the basis of how well their students perform is an idea that has been winning increasing support, both in the United States and abroad, and many school systems have adopted some version of it. Proponents claim that linking teacher pay to student performance is a powerful way to encourage talented and highly motiva...

The concept of "pay for performance" for public school teachers is once again growing in popularity and use. U.S. education is now at a critical juncture that requires thoughtful and informed consideration of this policy innovation. "Performance Incentives" offers the most up-to-date and complete analysis yet of the promising--yet still controversi...

In 2002, Florida adopted a test-based promotion policy in the third grade in an attempt to end social promotion. Similar policies are currently operating in Texas, New York City, and Chicago and affect at least 17 percent of public school students nationwide. Using individual-level data on the universe of public school students in Florida, we analy...

This study uses a widely respected method to calculate public high school graduation rates for the nation, for each state, and for the 100 largest school districts in the United States. The authors calculate graduation rates overall, by race, and by gender, using the most recent available data (the class of 2003). While this report builds upon a fo...

This study evaluates the effect of school district size on public high school graduation rates. The study calculates the graduation rate for each graduating class in each state between 1991 and 2002 and uses a fixed-effects model to examine the relationship between these graduation rates and changes in the size of each state's school districts duri...

This study examines whether the results of standardized tests are distorted when rewards and sanctions are attached to them, making them high-stakes tests. It measures the correlation in school-level test results—including both score levels and year-to-year score changes—on high-stakes and low-stakes tests administered in the same schools in nine s...

Advocates of vouchers believe that public schools facing the threat of losing students and funding to private schools will take the measures necessary to raise student performance. Opponents worry that vouchers will actually leave public schools worse off by draining them of funds and encouraging the best students and the most involved parents to f...

Many states have implemented high-stakes testing since the enactment of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. Yet the question remains whether high-stakes tests effectively measure student proficiency. This report describes a study that compared results on high-stakes tests with results on other standardized tests not used for accountability purpos...

This report uses a newly defined version of the Greene Method to calculate graduation rates for the public school class of 2000, comparing results to those of 1998. It calculates state and national figures using data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Common Core of Data. The 2000 national graduation rate was 69 percent (76 pe...