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Sociology and School Choice: What We Know After Two Decades of Charter Schools

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Abstract

Charter schools have been on the educational reform landscape for over twenty years. In the last ten years, a number of rigorous studies have examined the effects of these schools on student achievement and educational attainment. Findings reveal mixed results where student achievement is concerned (i.e., some positive, some negative, some neutral) and positive results in terms of educational attainment (i.e., high school graduation and college attendance). The article places this research within a framework that draws on both market and institutional theories, and concludes that additional research on the social organization of charter schools and traditional public schools is needed to better understand the conditions under which school choice is or is not effective.Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Sociology Volume 41 is July 30, 2015. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/catalog/pubdates.aspx for revised estimates.

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... In the face of growing diversity of parental expectations, many countries have incorporated private governmentdependent schools into their education systems (Berends, 2015;Education Bureau, 2001;Lubienski & Lee, 2016;West & Ylönen, 2010). It offers parents an expanded range of options but also intensifies schools' fierce competition for students, given the global decline in birth rates in advanced societies (Barakat, 2014;Uba, 2010). ...
... Studies are rich in the USA, where the introduction of charter schools expanded parental school choices. These studies not only shed light on the significance of schools' test scores and types but also on the demographic composition of the student body, demonstrating that these factors play a crucial role in the school selection process (Berends, 2015;Betts et al., 2006;Hastings & Weinstein, 2008). Furthermore, there is an exploration into how school choice serves as a mechanism for the (re)production of inequities (see Diamond & Lewis, 2022;Evans, 2021;Simms & Talbert, 2019). ...
... Although prior studies tried to understand how specific information of schools associate with parental choice, the question of how schools' information revealing their own educational orientations affect parental choices remains uncleared. This question is more complicated when more school types were introduced to students as the expanded school choices allows greater autonomy for private government-dependent schools to shape their own educational orientations, (Barbara, 2002;Berends, 2015;Education Bureau, 2001;West & Wolfe, 2019). For example, charter schools in the U.S.A. offer a wide variety of educational approaches from stressing only core disciplines to arts or sciences to Montessori schools to virtual schools (Carpenter, 2005). ...
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Against the background of expanding parental choices and declining global birth rates, schools are experiencing rising competition regarding student enrolment. Schools have responded by strategically presenting information about their students’ academic achievement and whole-person development orientation in the hope of attracting parents’ interest. However, few studies have investigated the impact of these factors on student enrollment, particularly in the context of diverse school types and educational orientations. Accordingly, this study utilized data from 327 secondary schools in Hong Kong to examine the effects of academic achievement orientation and whole-person development orientation on student intake. Using hierarchical regression analysis, we found a positive association between high whole-person development orientation and student intake in aided schools with a strong academic development orientation. The result implies parents are increasingly concerned about their children’s academic achievement and whole-person development at school. The study contributes to a broader understanding of the factors influencing parental choice in high-performing education systems, providing valuable insights for policymakers and educators seeking to improve educational offerings, enhance school transparency, and be better aligned with parental expectations.
... Palavras-chave: escolas charter; eficácia escolar; organização escolar; política educacional; práticas instrucionais; ambientes de aprendizagem schools on outcomes, they do not specify the possible mechanisms to explain those effects. To understand the heterogeneous effects, several have called for examining the conditions under which charter schools are effective (or not), pointing to the importance of organizational and instructional conditions that support student learning (see Berends, 2015Berends, , 2020. ...
... By focusing on school organizational practices, we expressly consider what charter schools are doing, taking a look inside of the "black box" of schooling (Berends, 2015). This limits the research examined to a school-context focus, and in some cases leads us to exclude studies that focus on the experiences, backgrounds, and contributions of the students, families, and communities that charter schools serve. ...
... We also conducted website searches of academic publishers using the same keyword to identify books published on charter schools during this period (see Table 1). We limited the search to the publication years of 2014-2019 because of the number of reviews that covered research before that time (Berends, 2015;Lubienski, 2003;Wohlstetter et al., 2013) and because the U.S. Department of Education has shifted its emphasis toward examining the moderators and mediators of charter school effects (U.S. Department of Education, 2018, 2019). ...
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Charter school policies have focused on improving three aspects of schools—autonomy, innovation, and accountability—with the intention of promoting advances in curriculum, instruction, and learning that lead to better student outcomes. However, most research on charter schools tends to neglect school organizational and instructional conditions. Overall, reviews show that charter schools have inconsistent effects on student achievement scores, a finding that masks heterogeneous effects among different types of charter schools, operators of charter schools, and authorizers of charter schools and the organizational and instructional conditions under which they operate. This systematic review of the literature focuses on what we know about the organization of charter schools and the resources—material, human, and social as well as professional development and teaching practices—within them. We end by identifying gaps where more research is needed.
... Social scientists have often investigated the role, consequences, and predictors of education reform efforts, such as charter schools and test-based accountability (Berends, 2015;Hanushek, 2019;Jennings & Bearak, 2014;Renzulli, 2005). In investigating charter schools that receive government funding but operate independently, scholars have often focused on its mixed results for student test score achievement and generally positive outcomes for graduation attainment (Berends, 2015;Hofflinger & von Hippel, 2020). ...
... Social scientists have often investigated the role, consequences, and predictors of education reform efforts, such as charter schools and test-based accountability (Berends, 2015;Hanushek, 2019;Jennings & Bearak, 2014;Renzulli, 2005). In investigating charter schools that receive government funding but operate independently, scholars have often focused on its mixed results for student test score achievement and generally positive outcomes for graduation attainment (Berends, 2015;Hofflinger & von Hippel, 2020). Other studies focus on what contributes to reforms emerging, particularly factors in the local environment such as legislation, other nonreligious private schools, and institutional context (King et al., 2011;Renzulli, 2005). ...
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The success and failure of education reform policies often depend on the strategies of reformers. This article suggests a framework to understand the positionality of reformers, as they vary in their strategy (i.e., technical vs. relational) and focus for change (i.e., process- vs. outcomes-focused). Using the case of individuals who initiated new data systems in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York City, the study discusses four groups of reformers: Engineers privilege efficient technical fixes that may be resisted by people on the ground. Capacity-builders focus on empowering schools but may lead to variable successes. Framers research and disseminate ideas to reframe policy and political discourses. Table-setters leverage their social networks and financial resources but may challenge democratic decision-making. As schools continue to be sites of political debates and challenges, the concept of positionality can clarify how reformers promote particular changes and can suggest possibilities for positions to constructively complement each other.
... Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, 2018). Much of this recent growth can be attributed to the concurrent rise of CMOs, with the proportion of charters belonging to such networks nearly doubling between 2007 and 2012 (Berends, 2015;Miron et al., 2012). ...
... These stressors are mitigated by effective management practices. Charter schools, especially the larger CMOs, are known for having more exhaustive teacher and school leader selection processes than their TPS counterparts; they emphasize cultivating strong leaders, offering frequent teacher professional development, and hiring teachers who have the right mission "fit" (Berends, 2015;Golann, 2018). Consequently, we might expect charter school teachers to report higher degrees of job satisfaction, and studies using early waves of SASS confirm this to be the case (Price, 2012;Renzulli et al., 2011). ...
... Section 8 housing vouchers can be applied to any participating and qualifying unit, but the rules and guidelines of participation, selection, and porting (or transferring) are determined by public housing authorities. Lastly, choice-based schools vary in quality, mission, agenda, and curriculum -even if actual changes to educational practices are overstated (Berends, 2015). ...
... In healthcare, the ACA marketplaces target moderate-income families ineligible for Medicaid and affordable employer-sponsored plans. In education, charter and magnet schools often serve families across the socioeconomic spectrum (Berends, 2015). While housing voucher programs generally target households below a certain income threshold, programs often restrict enrollment by characteristics that preclude disempowered populations (e.g., criminal record; Edin et al., 2012;Pashup et al., 2005;Rosen, 2020). ...
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Social service programs in the United States increasingly focus on giving individuals and families more “choices.” The approach is exemplified by “choice programs,” where people receive services through various forms of market participation. Examples of choice programs include defined contribution retirement plans, housing vouchers, charter schools, and health insurance marketplaces. Individuals across the socioeconomic spectrum have become accustomed to choice programs, and one's social status greatly affects the types, qualities, and prices of services people receive. The importance of the conversation around choice programs for providing access to resources is immense. Yet, despite contentious debate about their utility, we lack a comprehensive understanding of the institutionalization and widespread adoption of choice programs across a diverse range of social service domains. This article synthesizes stratification literature on retirement, healthcare, education, and housing to document the historical rise of choice programs. Particular attention is given to explaining how behavioral patterns and routines become second nature, altering who benefits, who is left out, and the overall effectiveness of the social welfare system.
... As traditional school districts expand their school choice programs to be responsive to current market-based demands for 21st century workforce skills, it is imperative to examine how existing school choice programs are influencing student achievement, which could potentially determine their success in accessing and thriving in postsecondary opportunities. A need clearly exists to determine the extent to which these programs are effectively implemented, particularly given the preponderance of studies about charter schools and magnet programs (e.g., Archbald et al., 2018;Blatt & Votruba-Drzal, 2021;Berends, 2015;Kitmitto et al., 2016;Linkow, 2011;Ni & Arsen, 2011;Teasley et al., 2016). ...
... However, the mixed results from this investigation were in contrast with a number of previous researchers who provided evidence of positive effects of school choice participation on reading and mathematics performance (e.g., Bicer & Capraro, 2018;Bonner, 2017;Kitmitto et al., 2016;Sahin et al., 2017). The mixed findings from this study, consistent with previous researchers (e.g., Berends, 2015;Browne & Slate, 2021;Cohodes, 2018;Jabbar et al., 2019;Linkow, 2011;Raymond et al., 2013) provide insufficient evidence that school choice offers the much sought-after academic benefits for students of color when compared with neighborhood campuses. Nevertheless, the positive outcomes that emerged from this investigation do not discount the potential of school choice programs to narrow the achievement gaps of students of color more specifically for Black students. ...
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Differences between schools of choice and neighborhood high schools were examined in terms of the performance of their students of color on the Texas state-mandated English I and Algebra 1 exams for three school years. Hispanic students from neighborhood campuses outperformed their peers from the schools of choice at the Approaches and Meets Grade Level standards but not at the Masters Grade Level standard on the English I exam, and on the Algebra I exam except at the Meets Grade Level standard. Black students from schools of choice outperformed their peers from the traditional high schools on the English I exam but not on the Algebra I EOC exam. Implications and recommendations for future research were discussed.
... Inwieweit die sozialräumliche Verteilung privater Schulen tatsächlich soziale Ungleichheiten bei ihrem Besuch erklären kann, hängt also auch davon ab, wie sich Privatschulen räumlich verteilen, also ob sie für sozial privilegierte Schichten besser zu erreichen sind. sind, in denen People of Color unter den SchülerInnen überrepräsentiert sind (Berends 2015). Auch Edmark (2019) zeigt für Schweden, dass dort mehr Privatschulen entstanden sind, wo der Anteil ausländischer Schüler höher ist. ...
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Zusammenfassung In Deutschland ist die Zahl der Privatschulen seit 1992 erheblich gestiegen, insbesondere in Ostdeutschland. Diese Schulen werden überwiegend von SchülerInnen aus sozioökonomisch privilegierten Haushalten besucht, während Kinder aus einkommensschwachen Familien seltener vertreten sind. In diesem Beitrag untersuchen wir, ob die räumliche Verteilung der Privatschulen mit sozialen Ungleichheiten beim Privatschulbesuch im Zusammenhang steht. Hierfür schätzen wir lineare Wahrscheinlichkeitsmodelle mithilfe von georeferenzierten Daten des Sozio-oekonomischen Panels und Adressdaten aller deutschen Schulen von 2000 bis 2019. Insgesamt zeigen sich kaum Hinweise darauf, dass private Schulen vor allem dort zu finden sind, wo sozioökonomisch privilegierte Haushalte leben. Allerdings reagieren letztere in ihrer Schulwahl sensibler auf die Entfernung zu Privatschulen. Für sozial benachteiligte Gruppen spielt die Entfernung eine untergeordnete Rolle, da Privatschulen oft nicht als echte Alternative wahrgenommen werden.
... This includes factors such as the neighborhood's social and economic conditions, social and community resources, and the quality of its physical environment (Giffords Law Center, 2018;Adewuyi, 2023). It is believed that neighborhood conditions and characteristics can impact individual behavior and wellbeing in various ways, including exposure to brutality and crime, access to educational and economic opportunities, and social relationships and networks (Berends, 2015). ...
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Learners receive less instruction from schools with high rates of brutality, violence, and crime. These schools have lower Academic achievement and absenteeism and higher dropout rates. This study examined the pattern of relationship between neighborhood influence, social media, and school brutality. This study employed a descriptive survey of correlational design, and a multistage sampling procedure was utilized. Adolescents (N = 298; 31.54% female, 68.46% male) aged 11 to 17 participated. Participants completed standardized instruments: (Perceived Neighborhood Influence Questionnaire α = 0.79; Social Media Scale α = 0.77 and Violent Behavior Assessment Scale α = 0.91). The results showed that neighborhood influence (r =.442, p<0.05) and social media (r =.528, p<0.05) all had a significant relationship with school brutality. Also, social media usage recorded the most effective relative contribution to school brutality, followed by neighborhood influence. This emphasizes that schools should work with local community groups to make neighborhoods safe and helpful for students. This can help to lower the chance of brutality at school and help students do well.
... Gaur egun, gurasoek ikastetxea hautatzeko duten askatasunak indar handia du. Ikerketa-ebidentzia ugarik erakutsi dute eskola-hautuak irizpide praktikoetan oinarrituta egoteaz gain (etxearekiko hurbiltasuna, lekualdaketaren kostua edo bidaia-denbora), ikastetxeari esleitutako prestigio-, estatus-eta kultura-kapitala ere aintzat izaten direla (Berends, 2015). Gainera, hautaketa prozesuan, klase ertaineko gurasoak eragile aktibo gisa agertzen diren bitartean, desabantailatsuenak eragile pasiboagoak eta tokian tokira bideratuagoak dira (Burgess et al., 2015). ...
... Gaur egun, gurasoek ikastetxea hautatzeko duten askatasunak indar handia du. Ikerketa-ebidentzia ugarik erakutsi dute eskola-hautuak irizpide praktikoetan oinarrituta egoteaz gain (etxearekiko hurbiltasuna, lekualdaketaren kostua edo bidaia-denbora), ikastetxeari esleitutako prestigio-, estatus-eta kultura-kapitala ere aintzat izaten direla (Berends, 2015). Gainera, hautaketa prozesuan, klase ertaineko gurasoak eragile aktibo gisa agertzen diren bitartean, desabantailatsuenak eragile pasiboagoak eta tokian tokira bideratuagoak dira (Burgess et al., 2015). ...
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Eskola-segregazioa, hau da, ikasleen banaketa desberdina eskoletako ezaugarri pertsonal edo sozialen arabera, gizarte-desberdintasunean eragiten duena, euskal hezkuntza sistemaren arazo nagusienetako moduan identifikatu da azken urteotan. Euskal eskola-segregazioaren oinarri nagusietako bat gurasoek beraien seme-alaben ikastetxea hautatzeko duten ahalmena dela azpimarratzen da, zeinak white flight (WF) fenomenoa ahalbidetzen duen. Baina WF-aren aurkako fenomenoa ere agertzen da literatura akademikoan, alegia, klase ertaineko hainbat familiak eskola publikoaren aldeko hautua egiten dute balore aurrerakoietan oinarrituta. Beraz, ikerketa honen helburu nagusia WF-aren aurkako fenomenoa Euskal Herrian (EH) aztertzea da. Hots, EHko gurasoek beraien seme-alaben ikastetxea hautatzeko dituzten argudio nagusiak arakatu asmoz eta metodologia kualitatibo batez baliatuz, bi ikastetxe (Eskola Publikoa eta Ikastola itundua) baino ez dauden 10.000 biztanleko herri batean oinarritu da kasu-azterketa hau. Horretarako, bi ikastetxeetako gurasoei egindako elkarrizketak baliatu ditugu (n=9) eta jasotako informazioa aztertzeko NVivo Release softwareren laguntza izan dugu. Emaitzen artean agertzen zaizkigu batetik, eremu politiko-administratiboan eskola-inklusioa eta –segregazioa lantzen duten dokumentu ofizial ugari daudela eta, bestetik, maila sozioekonomiko ertaineko gurasoek eskola publikoaren aldeko hautua ezkerreko baloreetatik ez ezik, euskararen defentsatik ere egiten dutela. Honenbestez, literatura akademikoan jasotzen den WF-aren aurkako mugimendua EHan bertako ezaugarri propio bati loturik, euskaren atxikimenduari, agertzen dela ondorioztatu daiteke.
... Advocates of market-oriented policies contend that expanding choice can weaken the influence of privilege in access to educational opportunities, though the evidence is mixed. On the one hand, promoting choice options such as charter schools has yielded benefits to both students who enroll in them and-via competitive effects-those who attend schools nearby (Berends 2015;Jabbar et al. 2022) in some (but not all) cases. On the other hand, researchers have also warned that choice policies can exacerbate existing inequalities, insofar as access to valued information, social networks, and resources are crucial for capitalizing on the new opportunities that become available in a more competitive marketplace (see e.g., Cucchiara 2013; Rich and Jennings 2015;Roda and Wells 2013;Wells 1991;Wells et al. 2019). ...
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Economic sociologists have long recognized that markets have moral dimensions, but we know less about how everyday moral categories like fairness are reconciled with competing market principles like efficiency, especially in novel settings combining market design and algorithmic technologies. Here we explore this tension in the context of education, examining the use of algorithms alongside school choice policies. In US urban school districts, market design economists and computer scientists have applied matching algorithms to build unified enrollment (UE) systems. Despite promising to make school choice both fair and efficient, these algorithms have become contested. Why is it that algorithmic technologies intended to simplify enrollment and create a fairer application process can instead contribute to the perception they are reproducing inequality? Analyzing narratives about the UE system in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, we show that experts designing and implementing algorithm-based enrollment understand fairness differently from the education activists and families who use and question these systems. Whereas the former interpret fairness in narrow, procedural, and ahistorical terms, the latter tend to evaluate fairness with consequentialist reasoning, using broader conceptions of justice rooted in addressing socioeconomic and racial inequality in Louisiana, and unfulfilled promises of universal access to quality schools. Considering the diffusion of “economic styles of reasoning” across local public education bureaucracies, we reveal how school choice algorithms risk becoming imbued with incommensurable meanings about fairness and justice, compromising public trust and legitimacy. The study is based on thirty interviews with key stakeholders in the school district’s education policy field, government documents, and local media sources.
... Recent reviews and meta-analyses of the extant literature have suggested that, on average, school choice policies have small, positive impacts on educational attainment [13], academic achievement [5], and disciplinary issues [10]. However, these positive effects have been found to be moderated by demographic characteristics [5] and highly variable based on the quality of available alternative schools [14]. Despite the heterogeneity of results, the literature clearly suggests that, although school choice policies may have some benefits, they have not been the panacea that proponents suggest they should be. ...
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School choice initiatives–which empower parents to choose which schools their children attend–are built on the assumptions that parents know what features of a school are most important to their family and that they are capable of focusing on the most important features when they make their decisions. However, decades of psychological research suggest that decision makers lack metacognitive knowledge of the factors that influence their decisions. We sought to reconcile this discrepancy between the policy assumptions and the psychological research. To do so, we asked participants to complete Choice-Based Conjoint surveys in which they made series of choices between different hypothetical schools. We then asked participants to self-report the weight they placed on each attribute when making their choices. Across four studies, we found that participants did not know how much weight they had placed on various school attributes. Average correlations between stated and revealed weights ranged from r = .34–.54. Stated weights predicted different choices than revealed weights in 16.41–20.63% of decisions. These metacognitive limitations persisted regardless of whether the participants were parents or non-parents (Study 1a/1b), the nature of the attributes that participants used to evaluate alternatives (Study 2), and whether or not decision makers had access to school ratings that could be used as metacognitive aids (Study 3). In line with prior psychological research–and in contract to policy assumptions–these findings demonstrate that decision makers do not have particularly strong metacognitive knowledge of the factors that influence their school choice decisions. As a result, parents making school choice decisions are likely to seek out and use the wrong information, thus leading to suboptimal school choices. Future research should replicate these results in more ecologically valid samples and test new approaches to school choice that account for these metacognitive limitations.
... Other research has examined the school context, finding trends in which private schools are more likely to participate in choice programs (Austin, 2015;Sude et al., 2018), along with which students are more likely to use a voucher (Campbell et al., 2005) or attend a charter school (Hoxby & Murarka, 2009). Less research, however, has considered whether there have been changes in schools, particularly changes related to school organization (Austin & Berends, 2018;Berends, 2015). Understanding how schools and school sectors may adapt and change within a landscape of parental choice policies can provide additional evidence to further consider policy influence. ...
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Researchers have considered how school choice policies affect student achievement, but less inquiry explores how the organization of schools may change in the presence of choice. This descriptive and exploratory paper analyzes a state representative sample of school mission statements at two time points: before the enactment of choice policies in Indiana, namely the Indiana Choice Scholarship Program, and again six years into the policy. Using structural topic modeling, this paper examines whether and how school mission statements topics have changed over this period. Descriptive findings suggest mission statement topics differ significantly between sectors but show few changes over time. The most striking shift is that Catholic and other private religious schools appear to be clarifying the religious aspects of their mission in the presence of robust choice policies.
... This is particularly crucial in regions such as the United States (US), the United Kingdom (UK), and Hong Kong (HK), where the growing adoption of neoliberal quasi-market mechanisms involving choices of diverse school types, including private, public, Charter schools (US), Academies (UK), and Direct Subsidy schools (HK), has intensified competition between schools (Dronkers & Avram, 2010;Ho & Lu, 2019;Lee et al., 2019;Lubienski & Lee, 2016). To stand out, schools must clearly communicate their unique educational values and address specific parental needs and concerns (Berends, 2015;Buddin, 2012;Butler et al., 2013). Despite these efforts, the effect of experiential marketing in shaping parents' PSA has received little research attention. ...
Article
This study explores the mechanisms that underlie the effect of school marketing strategies on parents’ perceived school attractiveness, particularly emphasizing the mediating role of parents’ perceptions of being welcomed in urban schools. Additionally, we investigated how schools’ marketing strategies work differently among parents with different value orientations toward schooling. Structural Equation Modeling and Cluster Analysis Data were applied to analyze 510 questionnaires collected from parents. Two experiential marketing strategies, namely, one-way disseminating materials and interactive social networking, impacted parents’ perceived attractiveness of schools differently with the feeling of being welcomed mediating the relationship between parents and schools. Additionally, parents’ value orientations toward schooling could be classified into three profiles. The results suggest that schools should consider parents’ needs and preferences concerning their children’s schooling and employ appropriate marketing strategies to engage different types of parents. To facilitate this outcome, individualized interaction is necessary to accommodate the diverse needs of parents. The overall structural equation model validates the mechanism of experiential marketing in influencing parental perceptions, and the cluster analysis underscores the need to explore the complex relationship between parents’ educational priorities and their interpretation of marketing strategies.
... But on the other hand, schools also implicitly and explicitly compete for student enrollment, district funding, school achievement, and high-quality students. Organizational studies have focused on this competition among schools, particularly with charter schools where funding depends on the number of student (Berends 2015;Oberfield 2017). Such competition can at times entail inter-school differentiation when resources are widely available, and conformity when institutional resources are low (King, Clemens, and Fry 2011). ...
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Highlighting changes in education and organizational theorizing since the 1950s, this review integrates three perspectives for an organizational sociology of education. The structural perspective focuses on how the formal organization of resources, relationships, and information can influence student outcomes and inequalities through opportunities to learn. The network perspective highlights the role of informal interactions and interpretation as well as social and cultural capital to bring about changes. The ecological perspective illustrates how schools are affected by other schools (horizontal dimension), the educational bureaucracy (vertical dimension), and organizations outside schools (community dimension). An organizational perspective can concretize often abstract sociological topics on stratification, social reproduction, and socialization. The perspective can also reconceptualize often individualistic views on contemporary education issues like student well‐being, teacher shortage, racial inequalities, and school politics. The review ends with a discussion on how to incorporate these organizational perspectives and how they can complement current studies in education, sociology, and public policy.
... School choice has been most often discussed in relation to providing greater educational opportunities to all, especially socially marginalised groups globally (Ball et al., 2013;Berends, 2015) and in India (Mehendale et al., 2015). The first of such attempts was made through market-based models. ...
Article
So far research on school choice sets (decision about choosing a school from an available set of schools) has primarily regarded parents as key actors. Moving beyond, this article emphasises that children are important actors as they inform parental decisions to co-produce certain choice sets.
... An abundance of evidence points to the ways that choice policies render inequities for Black and Latino children via racial segregation (Berends, 2015;Bifulco & Ladd, 2007;Kotok et al., 2017;Lubienski & Brewer, 2023;Orfield & Frankenberg, 2013;Roda & Wells, 2013), stratification (Adamson et al., 2015;Mommandi & Welner, 2021), student attrition (Heilig et al., 2011), and exclusion of students with disabilities (Hawkins, 2016;Waitoller, 2020;P. B. v. Brumley, 2015). ...
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Education research has often overlooked how the long durée of resistance for Black education has shaped current educational policy. We complicate notions of Black public school closures in two case studies from extensive ethnographic research in post-Katrina New Orleans through our reading of the plantation. Findings suggest these institutions have served as lynchpins for the transferal of the blues. Data analysis also indicates that traditional public school closures have functioned as a plantation management device. We encourage future inquiries into portfolio governance models, school “choice,” and school closures to consider the plantation complex and to recognize that post-Katrina education reforms were not isolated policy enactments.
... School choice options grew predominantly in large urban areas in earlier decades, but they have expanded into innerring suburbs in recent years (Ganski, 2015;Holme et al., 2013). Since the inception of choice initiatives, an important policy motive has been expanding less privileged families' access to schools beyond the traditional neighborhood schools to which they are assigned (Friedman, 1955). 2 Yet choice policies have been criticized for creaming relatively efficacious, near-poor families in low-and moderate-income neighborhoods (Altonji et al., 2015;Berends, 2015;Haynes et al., 2010). Also, within the school choice domain itself, there is a salient hierarchy where more privileged families hoard attractive opportunities (e.g., higher performing charter schools), leaving other options for less privileged participants in the choice market (Lyken-Segosebe & Hinz, 2015;Roda & Wells, 2013;Sattin-Bajaj & Roda, 2018;Wilson, 2019). ...
Article
Parents desire several features when choosing a school, but they often compromise on some preferences in favor of others. We develop a novel measure of aggregate preference compromise by examining the discrepancy between ideal preferences and those specified under real-world constraints. Relying on data from a representative sample in Kansas City, MO, we find that low-income and less educated parents and those from historically marginalized racial/ethnic backgrounds make a greater degree of preference compromise than other parents do. This is associated with lower satisfaction with chosen schools, suggesting that compromises matter. Less privileged families are also geographically more restricted in making school choices and have more limited access to better performing schools, which can aggravate preference compromises. Implications are discussed.
... These reforms often target children from racially minoritized groups and children living in poverty in large urban contexts (Scott and Holme 2016). Research has shown that advocates employ equity-based rationales for choice, arguing that school-choice policies give marginalized families access to better schooling options (Scott 2011), but charter schools (Angrist et al. 2013;Berends 2015) and school vouchers (Abdulkadiroglu et al. 2015;Jeynes 2012) have had mixed results in improving student outcomes. And research has documented how school choice reproduces, or widens, inequalities in education (Frankenberg et al. 2011;Jennings 2010;Lenhoff 2020;Lubienski et al. 2009;Phillips et al. 2015;Stein 2015). ...
... Embedded within this conversation are discussions around creating educational alternatives for students where they will be safe to pursue their education (Hanushek, Kain, Rivkin, & Branch, 2007;Haynes, Phillips, & Goldring, 2010). One option that has consistently presented itself as a safe alternative to traditional public school is charter schools (Berends, 2015;Denice, Gross, & Rausch, 2015). Within the literature of education policy, scholars discuss the effect of discipline policies on various aspects of the school community (Gregory, Skiba, & Noguera, 2010;Noguera, 2003) . ...
... Latinx students attend under-resourced K-12 schools compared to their peers (Gándara & Contreras, 2009). College-preparatory charter schools have emerged as an intervention (Berends, 2015). Although few studies have examined the effect of charter schools on overall educational attainment, some research shows that charter schools have a larger impact on high school graduation and college attendance for Latinx students compared to whites (Booker, Sass, Gill, & Zimmer, 2011). ...
... Research evidence on its impact, focusing both on the 'quality' and 'efficiency' of schools, as well as on social segregation in education, is far from unanimous (e.g. Hoxby, 2003;Berends, 2015;Burgess et al., 2011;Reay & Ball, 1997), first and foremost because of the very different social and educational contexts where school choice was introduced. ...
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The article scrutinises the application process and its consequences in terms of educational inequalities in early selective grammar schools in Hungary. The focus is on the almost one-year-long process of preparation for the entrance exams to these grammar schools. Its main aim is to depict how the gradual nature of getting into secondary education intensifies social selection within the educational sector. The analysis is based upon the findings of a mixed method research, of which the results of the two waves of the survey and the consecutive interviews will be analysed. The article provides evidence of successful practices during the preparation process to these schools, as well as evidence of self-exclusion mechanisms for socially disadvantaged families. Overall, the results suggest that the most important selection factors are not the written or oral entrance exams themselves, but the decision to enter and remain in the preparation process, as well as the strategic decisions made by the parents during the preparation process.
... While racialized school choice policy gets enacted at the structural level to enable the formation of charter schools, it also interacts with a localized neighborhood context, specifically a local school district which must then allocate a place, a space, to house the charter school (Berends 2015;Garcia 2008;Renzulli and Evans 2005). As race scholars have shown, space too is embedded in racialized systems, which shape its economic, political, cultural, and ideological mechanisms (Brunsma et al. 2020;Delaney 2002;Embrick and Moore 2020;Neely and Samura 2011). ...
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Much research documents the systems of racism that undergird the rise of school choice policies and charter schools, racialized organizations that reproduce racial logics. While school choice policy gets enacted at the structural level to enable the formation of charter schools, policy also interacts with a localized neighborhood context where space must be allocated to the charter school. As race scholars show, space is itself racialized. How does this localized allocation of racial space shape intra-group dynamics in a predominantly Latinx neighborhood? Evidence for this study comes from two years of ethnographic participant-observation and informal conversations with parents in a traditional public school and a charter school in a large Northeastern city. Findings show how threats to the material boundaries of school space activate symbolic boundaries between parents from each school, drawing from racialized organizational identities of traditional public schools as representing neighborhood loyalty and anti-gentrification resistance positioned against charter schools as representing dominant whiteness, superiority, and social mobility. I conclude with a discussion of implications for broader studies of racialized space and organizations, culture, and collective action.
... When making decisions, they must take structures, rules, and procedures regulating the functioning of the schools into consideration. This also implies that environments in which schools operate can constrain the actions of school administrators and teachers (Berends, 2015). ...
Chapter
Since the urbanization of many nations’ populations, schools have become increasingly bureaucratized, often becoming the basic building blocks of larger school systems. Despite this, schools have retained some of their unique properties because of varying student needs and expectations of the immediate cultural and economic environments. Since the late twentieth century, the market ideology within neoliberalism has become a dominant feature of them, often advanced in the guise of education reforms. In this regard, strict standardization and accountability policies have been introduced to push schools to produce uniform student outcomes, often embedded in the agenda of reducing or eliminating achievement gaps between identifiable student groups by race or class. Within the scope of these policies, competition between schools has been encouraged through school choice reforms and ranking of schools. Professional associations and educational agencies at different governmental levels have supplemented these policies through identifying the so-called result-oriented leadership practices for school principals. Despite much legislation and financial investment, schools have produced overall disappointing results, especially in the academic subjects. Competition between schools has worsened the situation of low performing and culturally different students. Teachers have not always supported the applications and goals prescribed by these policies, and their unions have sometimes adopted a hostile reaction to them. Howbeit, school principals have struggled to be effective leaders, even as their increased workload has resulted pushing it to the classroom teacher level. Accordingly, rigid policies have failed to address the highly variable human aspects of education, and the one-size-fits-all approach centered on eliminating achievement gaps has not been able to transform school contexts to conform to policy requirements. One paradox of this dilemma is that as instruction becomes more effective it increases rather than decreases the achievement differences between students. The aim of decreasing achievement gaps through standardization is therefore somewhat of “a fool’s errand.”
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Virtual Schools in the U.S. 2023 is NEPC's ninth comprehensive report on the performance of U.S. virtual schools. It provides scholarly analyses of the characteristics and performance of full-time, publicly funded K–12 virtual schools; reviews the relevant available research related to virtual school practices; provides an overview of recent state legislative efforts to craft virtual school policy; and offers policy recommendations based on the available evidence.
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Bilingualism and multilingualism are complex and multi-layered issues in education and innovative language policies hold transformative potential with global implications. This chapter presents the intricate landscape, distinguishing between individual and bilingualism within social groups, communities, regions, or entire nations. The central theme of this chapter deals with the transformative power of bilingual education and language policy, particularly for minority language communities. Across the globe, bilingual and multilingual individuals are facilitators for diverse social groups, whether concentrated in specific areas or dispersed across various communities. Through a comprehensive exploration of these dynamics, this chapter aims to inspire a deeper understanding of the broader impact of bilingualism and multilingualism on society and the critical role of education and policy in fostering linguistic diversity.
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Education has often acted as a social microcosm that reflects the growing levels of religious andcultural diversity, with educators facing the daily task of responding pedagogically and interculturally to thechallenges this evolving context brings. In order to assure high quality education in developing countries,curriculum development efforts are often initiated as part of international cooperation projects. Culture affectsthe educational context of the countries involved as well as the ways in which curriculum developers fromdifferent countries are used to working and behaving. Therefore, the influences of culture on curriculumdevelopment cannot be neglected. This article aims to analyze several significant benefits when teachersincorporate cultural relevance in curriculum development, and establish a foundation in the sociology ofcurriculum. The benefits are as follows: (1) promote students‘ cultural identity and self-esteem; (2) promotestudents‘ engagement and motivation in learning; (3) critical thinking and perspective-taking; (4) reducingstudents‘ stereo types and prejudice; (5) creates a meaningful connection between students‘ experiences andtheir education; (6) preparation for a diverse society.
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School choice has emerged as an alternative to traditional public education, allowing families to select schools outside their neighborhood. While extensive research has examined its impact on students overall, there is a need to focus on its specific effects on students with disabilities. This article addresses this gap by reviewing 39 quantitative studies analyzing this issue using administrative data. Twenty-eight focus on charter schools, and 18 compare differences in enrollment—usually referred to as the “SPED gap”—between sectors. However, few publications explore factors contributing to these disparities or variations in services provided and their impact on student outcomes. We propose future research should (a) explore outcomes beyond enrollment disparities, including both academic and non-academic aspects, as well as short and long-term consequences; (b) employ rigorous statistical methods; (c) broaden the scope of the investigation to encompass diverse states and contexts, as well as other choice policies.
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This article examines the role urban high schools play in influencing students’ postsecondary plans. While postsecondary aspirations and attendance have become more universal experiences over time for low-income students in the United States, the kinds of high schools they attend are increasingly heterogeneous in their missions and orientations to college. We know little about how variation among high schools maps onto differences in how students are supported or advised on their postsecondary plans. Drawing on 73 in-depth interviews with high school seniors, counselors, and principals in Philadelphia, I find that school structures tend to compound differences among students related to how they think about the value of college, consider which postsecondary programs fit them best, and seek out guidance from adults. I contrast the strategies of socioeconomically diverse and socioeconomically disadvantaged schools on four dimensions: curriculum, counseling, staff and peer networks, and orientation to work. Diverse schools foster exploratory adolescence, orienting students towards open-ended and long-term educational goals. Disadvantaged schools promote expedited adulthood, an approach that prioritizes pragmatic over academic training in hopes of accelerating students’ paths to economic stability and self-sufficiency. These results point to the lasting effects of school segregation and sorting mechanisms that shape students’ long-term educational and career trajectories.
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This paper examines how relationships among government and “outside” organizations influenced policy implementation of new dropout prediction data systems. Using comparative historical and network analyses of three cities, I suggest the concept of interorganizational coupling—highlighting how the dependence and (in)formal collaborations among local school improvement organizations affected implementation speed, variation, and constraint. In Chicago, the loosely coupled system influenced slow and varied implementation, sustained by interpersonal relations and challenged by unclear division of labor. In Philadelphia, the tightly coupled system shaped swift and uniform changes, constrained by questions of sustainability. In New York, the tightening system led to fast yet variable transformations, limited by competition among organizations. Broadly, the article contributes to studies of education policies, interorganizational networks, and school improvement.
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This critical policy discourse analysis examines how No Excuses charter schools communicate their school goals and environments, and how they represent and portray their current and prospective students in online materials. We also aim to understand how the No Excuses paradigm has evolved and how, if at all, it is currently represented by these charter networks. We focus on whether and how the discourse in these materials may reflect deficit perspectives or contain language that shapes the construction of students and their families as policy targets, and thus create discourses that may ultimately be harmful to racially-minoritized students.
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El texto analiza las encrucijadas de la política educacional chilena en la postpandemia, de cara a los conflictos y contradicciones que ha venido arrastrando en las más de cuatro décadas desde que se instaló el modelo de mercado en educación, retorno a la democra-cia incluido, y cómo éste modelo ha sido un factor crítico que ha incidido en la política educacional, al extremo que estructuralmente su presencia ha marcado a la sociedad con una cultura que ha terminado validando al mercado y donde los desafíos de la micro-política se enfrentan a las rigideces derivadas de esta modalidad de financiamiento, gravando la desigualdad social y educativa, con el desaliento creciente de la ciudadanía con la educación, sobre la cual persisten grandes expectativas acerca de su aporte a la cali-dad de vida de las personas y de la sociedad que no cuajan con la realidad descrita.
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In this study, we examine whether students in violent neighborhoods actively avoid their local school as a form of social and physical protection. Specifically, we use 10 years of administrative data (2010–2020) from the high school choice open enrollment program in the Baltimore City Public School System to evaluate the interaction between neighborhood violence and geographic proximity when predicting choice behavior. We find that, adjusting for observed school characteristics and constant unobserved student characteristics, students from more violent neighborhoods are substantially less likely to choose their closest school than are students in safer neighborhoods; even when the closest school is listed, it is ranked lower for students from more violent neighborhoods than for students in safer ones. These findings have implications for how we think about the relationship between neighborhoods and educational opportunity in an era of choice.
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This article offers new empirical evidence regarding the limits of the premises of educational privatisation policies. Educational markets rely on the assumption that private participation has the potential to boost school diversification and open new educational opportunities for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Using a fresh empirical approach, we draw on the Chilean case to investigate this rationale, which remains a controversial issue in the global educational discussion regarding privatisation. We examine the assumption of diversification by analysing three aspects: the attributes used by private subsidised schools to position themselves in the educational market (‘Value Proposition’), the extent to which they embody these stated attributes and the alignment between them and parental preferences. Based on surveys and administrative records, our findings suggest that although schools display clear identities to position themselves in the educational market, there is also a mismatch between what some types of schools offer and what families receive. Our data also reveal a high level of social stratification between school types which cannot only be explained based on parental preferences or school admissions. We interpret the unfulfilled promise of diversification as a failure in the privatisation process. Based on these findings, we discuss the policy‐related factors of incoherent and unequal diversification in the Chilean educational system.
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So far research on school choice sets (decision about choosing a school from an available set of schools) has primarily regarded parents as key actors. Moving beyond, this article emphasises that children are important actors as they inform parental decisions to co-produce certain choice sets. This article foregrounds how school-going Muslim children’s experiences interact with their families to produce school choices across public and private schools in Bangalore, India, while accounting for their marginalisation at the intersections of religion, class and gender. Data were collected from 4 school sites using 21 focus group discussions with 190 children and in-depth interviews with 56 children, 14 teachers and 3 parents and analysed using an intersectional framework. Our findings suggest that factors like heterogeneities in social class, differential levels of religious discrimination/exclusion in schools and a need to protect their faith through education and the complex overlap between these were crucial in shaping choices.
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We estimate the longitudinal effects of charter schools authorized by different authorizing bodies on student achievement by using student-level data from Indiana. The results of our analysis point to substantial variation, especially between the state’s two largest authorizers: Ball State University and the Indianapolis Mayor’s Office. Some of the variation is driven by the types of operators these bodies authorize to run charter schools. However, operator effects are not consistent across authorizers, suggesting a more complex story about how authorization affects student achievement. These results point to the ways that public and private interests in charter schools may complicate the work of authorizers and suggest a need for policymakers to offer more guidance in how authorizers carry out their various accountability mandates.
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Recent headlines describing the national drop in public school enrollment suggest that this is a shocking crisis brought on or worsened by the pandemic. However, Abbie Cohen argues that the current enrollment decline should not be a surprise. The underlying causes have festered for decades. Among these causes is the tension between the different purposes of public schools. Those who see schools primarily as a means of social mobility have promoted a variety of school choice initiatives. These efforts have pulled resources out of traditional public schools, making it more difficult to reduce inequality and prepare all young people for participation in a democratic society. The shortcomings of public schools, particularly in urban communities, have fed a growing mistrust of schools, which leads more families to seek other options. These trends put at risk public schools’ ability to serve the public good.
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Schools provide theoretical and methodological puzzles around complex stratification and organizational dynamics. Using organizational field theory, and the Schools and Staffing Survey, we study characteristics of charter and traditional high schools that are correlated with school rates of college-going. We first use Oaxaca-Blinder (OXB) models to decompose shifts in characteristics between charter and traditional public high schools. We find that charters have come to look more like traditional schools which may account for some of charters' increase in college-going rates. Then we use Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) to examine how the combination of certain characteristics may create unique "recipes" that help some charters outpace traditional schools. Without both methods, we would have drawn incomplete conclusions, because the OXB results highlight isomorphism while QCA emphasizes variation in school characteristics. We contribute to the literature by showing how conformity and variation simultaneously yield legitimacy in an organizational population.
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For decades, charter schools have been promoted as a panacea for increasing competition in the educational marketplace. Supporters argue that increased choice forces neighboring schools to innovate, while opponents contend that charters “skim” students and funds away from traditional public schools (TPS). We test the two differing views by comparing academic achievement and school segregation in TPS in South Florida facing competition from charter schools compared to TPS with no competition. We find that when a charter school moves into the community, it fails to substantively change test scores or diversity of the nearby TPS, even 10 years after a charter is established.
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List of papers: Introduction 1. Sociological Contributions to School Choice Policy and Politics Around the Globe: Introduction to the 2020 PEA Yearbook Amanda U. Potterton, D. Brent Edwards Jr., Ee-Seul Yoon, and Jeanne M. Powers Section I: The Strategies and Responses of Schools and 2. Families to School Choice Policies School Counselors’ Assessment of the Legitimacy of High School Choice Policy Carolyn Sattin-Bajaj and Jennifer L. Jennings 3. Schools in the Marketplace: Analysis of School Supply Responses in the Chilean 43 Education Market Adrián Zancajo 4. Opting for Private Education: Public Subsidy Programs and School Choice in Disadvantaged Contexts Mauro Carlos Moschetti and Antoni Verger 5. The Development and Dynamics of Public–Private Partnerships in the Philippines’ Education: A Counterintuitive Case of School Choice, Competition, and Privatization Andreu Termes, D. Brent Edwards Jr., and Antoni Verger Section II: Sociology of School Choice Politics and Education Markets 6. Media Strategies in Policy Advocacy: Tracing the Justifications for Indiana’s School Choice Reforms Joel R. Malin, Christopher Lubienski, and Queenstar Mensa-Bonsu 7. Ideas and the Politics of School Choice Policy: Portfolio Management in Philadelphia Rand Quinn and Laura Ogburn 8. Parental Accountability, School Choice, and the Invisible Hand of the Market Amanda U. Potterton 9. School Choice Research and Politics with Pierre Bourdieu: New Possibilities 193 Ee-Seul Yoon Section III: Conflict and Competition for Resources in Organizational and Regulatory Contexts 10. Teacher Power and the Politics of Union Organizing in the Charter Sector Huriya Jabbar, Jesse Chanin, Jamie Haynes, and Sara Slaughter 11. Rearranging the Chairs on the Deck or True Reform? Private Sector Bureaucracies in the Age of Choice—An Analysis of Autonomy and Control Sarah Butler Jessen and Catherine DiMartino Commentary 12 Toward a Global Political Sociology of School Choice Policies Bob Lingard
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How are patterns of segregation related to families’ engagement in public-school choice policies across U.S. metropolitan areas? This article examines how segregation in urban public schools and the spatial mismatch between school-age children and relatively high-performing schools relate to the shares of Black, Hispanic, and White students enrolled in charter schools, one particular school choice mechanism. Drawing on Core-Based Statistical Area–level data, I find that charter-school enrollment among Black students is positively associated with spatial mismatch. As the degree of geographic imbalance between Black and, to a lesser extent, Hispanic school-age children and high-performing schools increases, so too does the share of Black and Hispanic students who enroll in charter schools. There is no such relationship for White students, whose enrollment in charter schools is higher when school segregation is relatively low—that is, when they would be more likely to attend neighborhood public schools with Black children.
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The Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) is an influential and rapidly growing nationwide network of charter schools serving primarily disadvantaged minority students. Prominent elements of KIPP's educational model include high expectations for student achievement and behavior, and a substantial increase in time in school. KIPP is being watched closely by policy makers and educators as a possible model for urban education, but existing studies of KIPP's effects on students have been subject tomethodological limitations,making them less than conclusive. We measure the achievement impacts of forty-one KIPP middle schools across the country, using propensity-score matching to identify traditional public school students with similar characteristics and prior-achievement histories as students who enter KIPP. We find consistently positive and statistically significant impacts of KIPP on student achievement, with larger impacts in math than reading. These impacts persist over four years following admission, and are not driven by attrition of low performers from KIPP schools.
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This article presents findings from a lottery-based study of the impacts of a broad set of 33 charter middle schools across 13 states on student achievement. To estimate charter school impacts, we compare test score outcomes of students admitted to these schools through the randomized admissions lotteries with outcomes of applicants who were not admitted. We find that impacts varied considerably across schools and students, with more positive impacts for more disadvantaged schools and students and more negative impacts for the more advantaged. On average across the schools in the study, the impacts of charter middle schools on student achievement were negative but not statistically significant, regardless of whether we examined the impact of the offer of admission or actual attendance at these schools.
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By most media accounts, charter schools are innovative schools. But little empirical work interrogates this idea. We examine the growth and decline of specialist charter school mission statements as one indicator of innovation. In line with theories of resource partitioning, we find that specialist charter school mis-sions—those asserting innovation with regards to populations served, curricula utilized, and/or educational focus—have become increasingly diverse over time. However, simultaneously, we find support for a generalist assimilation hypothesis: Charter schools have come to resemble traditional schools through isomorphic tendencies over time. Hence, we show that although specialist charter schools are becoming increasingly diverse in their missions, these charter schools are increasingly making up a smaller portion of the population. We also find, counter to charter school advocates' intentions, that states with more permissive charter school laws are those that also tend to have a great proportion of charter schools with generalist missions. Our findings contribute to a theoretical understanding of specialist organizations by considering specialization as an example of innovation in the charter school population. Furthermore, our findings have implications for the way charter school laws are created and enacted to foster innovation through specialization.
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A growing body of school choice research has shown that when school choice policies are not designed to racially or socioeconomically integrate schools, that is, are “colorblind” policies, they generally manage to do the opposite, leading to greater stratification and separation of students by race and ethnicity across schools and programs. Since white, advantaged parents are more likely to get their children into the highest-status schools regardless of the school choice policy in place, we believed that more research was needed on how those parents interact with school choice policies and whether they would support changes to those policies that would lead to less segregation across schools. Our interviews with advantaged New York City parents suggest that many are bothered by the segregation but that they are concerned that their children gain access to the “best” (mostly white) schools. The contradictions inherent in their choices are reconcilable, we argue, by offering more diverse and undivided school options.
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Since their inception in 1992, the number of charter schools has grown to more than 6,000 in 40 states, serving more than 2 million students. Various studies have examined charter schools’ impacts on test scores, and a few have begun to examine longer-term outcomes including graduation and college attendance. This paper is the first to estimate charter schools’ effects on student earnings, alongside effects on educational attainment. Using data from Chicago and Florida, we find evidence that charter high schools may have substantial positive effects on persistence in college as well as high-school graduation and college entry. In Florida, where we can link students to workforce data in adulthood, we also find evidence that charter high schools produce large positive effects on subsequent earnings.
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Given the importance of teachers to student learning, it is important to understand how and why charter schools differ in terms of their human capital. This paper explores the following questions: How do teacher qualifications and characteristics vary across school types? How much choice do teachers feel they have about where to work? How do teacher preferences for where to work differ by school type? Our findings suggest that charter school teachers do have different preferences for where to work compared to traditional public school teachers, but understanding these differences requires exploring differences among types of charter schools as well.
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Choice schools provide a unique laboratory where variation in governance and management structure is predicted. We examine the results from principal surveys from traditional and choice public schools, and compare challenges faced by principals and their leadership practice. Analyses show that while differences across school types are small, there are noteworthy variations among different types of charter schools. Our study broadens the understanding of school leadership in a choice environment by examining not only the association between leadership practices and school types, but also the influence of school management structures on instructional development beyond school type differences.
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We present the concept of instructional program coherence and explain why school improvement frameworks that incorporate instructional program coherence are more likely to advance student achievement than multiple, unrelated efforts. We present evidence that Chicago elementary schools with stronger instructional program coherence make higher gains in student achievement. We also share observations on how, in specific schools, principals and external partners directed key school resources toward the development of instructional program coherence. In closing, we discuss factors within the educational system that discourage instructional program coherence and suggest ways that school leaders, school improvement partners, and policymakers can support greater instructional program coherence.
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Although charter schools are growing in number, debate continues about whether they provide a better education than traditional public schools. The report examines charter schools in Chicago, Denver, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, San Diego, and the states of Florida, Ohio, and Texas, using longitudinal student-level data to examine issues across multiple communities and varied charter laws. Overall, there is little evidence that charter schools, on average, are producing test-score impacts that are substantially better or worse than those of conventional public schools, but favorable high school graduation and college-entry results suggest the possibility of long-term benefits. The authors also note that much more is yet to be learned, particularly about the performance of charter elementary schools.
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In recent years, a series of articles have examined the performance of charter schools with mixed results. Some of this research has shown that charter school performance varies by charter type or the age of the school (Bifulco & Ladd, 20063. Bifulco , R. and Ladd , H. 2006. The impact of charter schools on student achievement: Evidence from North Carolina. Education Finance and Policy, 1: 50–90. [CrossRef], [Web of Science ®]View all references; Buddin & Zimmer, 20058. Buddin , R. and Zimmer , R. 2005. A closer look at charter school student achievement. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 24: 351–372. [CrossRef], [Web of Science ®]View all references; Hanushek, Kain, & Rivkin, 200224. Hanushek, E. A., Kain, J. F., & Rivkin, S. G. (2002). The impact of charter schools on academic achievement. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research. Retrieved May 19, 2006, from http://http://www.nber.org/∼confer/2002/hiedf02/KAIN.pdf View all references; Sass, 200637. Sass , T. R. 2006. Charter schools and student achievement in Florida. Education Finance and Policy, 1: 91–122. [CrossRef], [Web of Science ®]View all references). However, this research has not examined the school attributes that lead to high- or low-achieving charter schools. In this article, we examine how student achievement varies with school operational features using student-level achievement and survey data for charter and a matched-set of traditional public schools from California. We did not find operational characteristics that were consistently related with student achievement, but we did identify some features that are more important at different grade levels or in charter schools versus in traditional public schools. We also examined the relationship between greater autonomy within schools, which is a major tenet of the charter movement, and student achievement and found very little evidence that greater autonomy leads to improved student achievement.
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Ability grouping appears to be a logical means of organizing a student body with diverse academic skills. Many observers contend, however, that the practice favors students in high-ability groups at the expense of students in lower groups. An organizational conception of ability grouping clarifies the rationale for ability grouping but also illuminates its shortcomings: Grouping students leads to segregation on nonacademic as well as academic criteria, and differentiated instruction may lead to unequal results for students assigned to different groups. These issues are explored with data from 92 honors, regular, and remedial English classes in eighth and ninth grade. We examine the characteristics of students placed in different groups, similarities and differences in the quality of instruction across groups, and the links between instruction and achievement. The data show that rates of student participation and discussion are higher in honors classes, contributing to the learning gaps between groups. Rates of open-ended questions are similar across classes, but honors students benefit more from such discourse because it occurs more often in the context of sustained study of literature.
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In theory, the charter school concept is based on a trade-off or exchange: greater autonomy for increased accountability. Although charter schools have been operating for more than 10 years, little is known about charter school autonomy in practice. This mixed-methods study used survey and case study data to examine the degree of autonomy of charter schools across the country and the factors limiting school autonomy. The findings indicate that many charter schools do not have high levels of autonomy, with schools least likely to have control over budgetary decisions. In addition, school autonomy is influenced by state laws, relationships with authorizers, and partnerships with educational management organizations and community-based organizations. Finally, the levels of autonomy in some schools were dynamic, with schools experiencing less autonomy over time.
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This product is part of the RAND Education working paper series. RAND working papers are intended to share researchers'latest findings and to solicit informal peer review. They have been approved for circulation by RAND Education but have not been formally edited or peer reviewed. Unless otherwise indicated, working papers can be quoted and cited without permission of the author, provided the source is clearly referred to as a working paper. RAND's publications do not necessarily reflect the opinions of its research clients and sponsors. is a registered trademark.
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The report analyzes an array of issues pertaining to student achievement, governance, operation, and accessibility of charter schools in California. Four specific research questions are investigated: (1) Is student achievement higher in charter schools than in conventional public schools? (2) What oversight and support do the chartering authorities provide? (3) How do charter schools differ from their conventional public school counterparts in terms of their operation, including finances, academic achievement, and staffing? (4) What population of students attend charter schools? One main finding is that there is no single charter school model-charter schools are not a homogeneous group and vary across many important dimensions. Regarding student achievement, results are mixed. Students in charter schools generally have comparable or slightly lower test scores than students in conventional public schools, but there is variation among the types of charter schools. With respect to governance, only a small proportion of chartering authorities are collecting accountability information such as student grades, promotion rates, and dropout rates. A major finding from examining the operation of charter schools suggests that these schools, particularly newly created charter schools, receive fewer public resources per student because of their lack of participation in categorical programs. Finally, in evaluating accessibility, we compare the average ethnic/racial makeup of charter and conventional schools within the same district. We find that charter students are more likely to be black and less likely to be Hispanic or Asian, but no more likely to be white.
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Studies of "school effects" must make a clear conceptual distinction between school and schooling. School is an organization that conducts instruction; schooling is the process through which instruction occurs. Schooling, which is a structure of action by students and teachers, is conditioned by the social organization of classrooms, curricular tracks, and other instructional units. A theory of schooling must include a conceptualization of its social organizational components. A theory of school effects must show how the organizational form of schools affects schooling. In research on school and schooling, it is important to differentiate levels of analysis to be sure that the level of analysis matches the level of conceptualization. Very different results may be obtained by research that does and does not maintain these conceptual and corresponding operational distinctions.
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The academic success of any school depends on its teachers. However, relatively little research exists on the qualities principals value in teacher hiring, and we know almost nothing about charter school principals’ preferences. This article addresses this gap in the literature using survey results for a matched sample of charter and traditional public school principals. We compare regression-adjusted survey responses of charter and traditional public school principals to examine whether charter school principals report placing more emphasis on teacher hiring than principals in traditional public schools and whether principals’ preferences for teacher qualifications and characteristics vary between charter and traditional public schools. While we find some mean differences in principals’ reported hiring focus and preferences across charter and traditional public schools, regression results indicate that these differences are driven not by charter status but by school characteristics, such as average teacher experience and school enrollment.
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Although several studies have linked adolescent residential and school mobility to an increased risk of dropping out of school, the reasons for this association have not been examined thoroughly. Using data from approximately 8500 respondents to the first two waves of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), we explore the ability of several domains of adolescent life—parent–child relationships, peer networks, academic performance, school attachment, and psychological well-being—to account for the higher rate of school dropout among mobile than non-mobile adolescents. Characteristics of adolescents’ peer networks, particularly students’ centrality in those networks and the academic performance of their friends, emerge as the most important mediators of the mobility-dropout association. We also find an increased risk of dropping out among both mobile and non-mobile students attending schools with high rates of student mobility, which appears partially attributable to lower levels of school attachment and weaker academic performance in high-mobility schools.
Book
This second volume from the National Working Commission on Choice in K-12 Education examines the connections between school choice and the goals of equity and efficiency in education. The contributors-distinguished university professors, high school administrators, and scholars from research institutions around the country-assess the efficiency of the educational system, analyzing efforts to boost average achievement. Their discussion of equity focuses on the reduction of racial and religious segregation in education, as well as measures to ensure that “no child is left behind.” The result is an authoritative and balanced look at how to maximize benefits while minimizing risks in the implementation of school choice. The National Working Commission on Choice in K-12 Education was established to explore how choice works and to examine how communities interested in the potential benefits of new school options could obtain them while avoiding choice’s potential harms. In addition to the editors, commissioners include Paul T. Hill and Dan Goldhaber (University of Washington), David Ferrero (Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation), Brian P. Gill and Laura Hamilton (Rand), Jeffrey R. Henig (Teachers College, Columbia University), Frederick M. Hess (American Enterprise Institute), Stephen Macedo (Princeton University), Lawrence Rosenstock (High Tech High, San Diego), Charles Venegoni (Civitas Schools in Chicago), Janet Weiss (University of Michigan), and Patrick J. Wolf (Georgetown University).
Article
The expansion of charter schools-publicly funded, yet in direct competition with traditional public schools-has emerged as a favored response to poor performance in the education sector. While a large and growing literature has sought to estimate the impact of these schools on student achievement, comparatively little is known about demand for the policy itself. Using election returns from three consecutive referenda on charter schools in Washington State, we weigh the relative importance of school quality, community and school demographics, and partisanship in explaining voter support for greater school choice. We find that low school quality-as measured by standardized tests-is a consistent and modestly strong predictor of support for charters. However, variation in performance between school districts is more predictive of charter support than variation within them. At the local precinct level, school resources, union membership, student heterogeneity, and the Republican vote share are often stronger predictors of charter support than standardized test results.
Conference Paper
Most of the policy discussion on the effects of educational vouchers has been premised on theoretical or ideological positions rather than evidence. This is article analyzes a substantial body of recent empirical evidence on achievement differences between public and private schools; on who chooses and ifs probable impact on educational equity; and on the comparative costs of public and private schools and an overall voucher system. The findings indicate that: (1) results among numerous studies suggest no difference or only a slight advantage for private schools over public schools in student achievement for a given student, but evidence of substantially higher rates of graduation, college attendance, and college graduation for Catholic high school students; (2) evidence is consistent that educational choice leads to greater socioeconomic (SES) and racial segregation of students; and (3) evidence does Mot support the contention that costs of private schools ave considerably lower than those of public schools, but the costs of an overall voucher infrastructure appear to exceed those of the present system.
Article
This article applies theoretical and empirical insights on diffusion to a contemporary, important, and striking case in point: the groundswell of state legislation on and implementation of charter schools over the past decade. Drawing from several data sources and using event-history analyses, competing risks, and random-effects negative binomial regression, the analyses examine how interstate dynamics and intrastate attributes affect the adoption of legislation on and the creation of charter schools within states. The findings reveal a strong mimetic tendency among adjacent states to adopt charter school legislation and regional similarities in the creation of charter schools. Internal attributes of states, such as competition between the private and public school sectors, the relative strength of teachers' unions, the presence of racial competition, urbanization, and political party dominance likewise play a role, depending on whether the analytic focus is on the adoption of legislation or the implementation of policy. The authors conclude by discussing the implications of the results for understanding the forces underlying innovation and change in educational policy.
Article
What is the shoulder-to-the grindstone work of transforming underperforming schools into higher performing schools? What makes this work so difficult? This book sheds light on these questions from the perspective of the Success for All Foundation (SFAF), an organization that has collaborated with thousands of elementary schools to enact a common strategy for comprehensive school reform, all in an effort to improve the reading achievement of millions of students. This story of SFAF spans twenty turbulent years. It begins in 1987, with the strategy of improving reading achievement by improving students' cooperative learning in classrooms. It stretches through 2008, with efforts to influence federal education policy to support that strategy. There is nothing in the story to suggest a quick fix. Rather, the theme that emerges is that the problems and possibilities of effective, large-scale, sustainable education reform lie in the complexity of public education: in interdependencies among underperforming schools, programs of reform, the organizations that advance those programs, and the environments in which all operate. The story ultimately locates the problems of education reform not in schools but, instead, in reformers, themselves. By tracing SFAF's deep push into public education, the purpose of the book is to assist a wide array of reformers in seeing, understanding, and ultimately confronting its complexity.
Article
Does experience in school increase or reduce social inequality in skills? Sociologists have long debated this question. Drawing from the counterfactual account of causality, we propose that the impact of going to school on a given skill depends on the quality of the instructional regime a child will experience at school compared with the quality of the instructional regime the child would receive if not at school. Children vary in their benefit from new instruction, and current skill increases this benefit. We hypothesize that the expansion of free, universal schooling promotes social equality in part by equalizing access to school, but also because disadvantaged children benefit more from access. However, we predict that this equalizing effect will be more pronounced for younger children than for older children. To test these hypotheses, we review empirical evidence regarding the impact of (a) increasing access to universal kindergarten and preschool, (b) interrupting schooling with the summer recess, (c) extending the school day, and (d ) extending years of compulsory schooling. We consider implications for the potential of school reform to reduce educational inequality.
Article
Education is usually seen as affecting society by socializing individuals. Recently this view has been attacked with the argument that education is a system of allocation, conferring success on some and failure on others. The polemic has obscured some of the interesing implications of allocation theory for socialization theory and for research on the effects of education. But allocation theory, too, focuses on educational effects on individuals being processed. It turns out to be a special case of a more general macrosociological theory of the effects of education as a system of legitimation. Education restructures whole populations, creating and expanding elites and redefining the rights and obligations of members. The institutional effects of education as a legitimation system are explored. Comparative and experimental studies are suggested.
Article
The authors are responsible for the content of this report. We owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Jonah Rockoff, whose clear-sighted thinking is behind solutions to many problems in this analysis. We analyze the achievement of 93 percent of the New York City charter school students who were enrolled in test-taking grades (grades 3 through 12) in 2000-01 through 2007-08. More than 94 percent of charter school applicants participate in admissions lotteries. The lotteries are crucial for remedying the self-selection problem because charter school applicants are substantially more likely to be black and poor than students in the traditional public schools. Using the lotteries to form an intention-to-treat variable, we instrument for actual enrollment and compute the charter schools' average treatment-on-the-treated effects on achievement. These are 0.09 standard deviations per year of treatment in math and 0.06 standard deviations per year of treatment in reading. These results are robust, as shown by specification tests for various issues: non-matching, attrition, retention-in-grade, returning to the traditional public schools, and so on. The results do not differ statistically significantly by the race/ethnicity of the student, the gender of the student, the number of years we observe the student, or the lotteried-in percentage of the school. We estimate associations (not causal relationships) between charter schools' policies and their effects on achievement. Policies with fairly consistent positive associations with achievement include a long school year; a greater number of minutes devoted to English during each school day; a small rewards/small penalties disciplinary policy; teacher pay based somewhat on performance or duties, as opposed to a traditional pay scale based strictly on seniority and credentials; and a mission statement that emphasizes academic performance, as opposed to other goals.
Article
School vouchers are the most contentious form of parental school choice. Vouchers provide government funds that parents can use to send their children to private schools of their choice. Here we examine the empirical question of whether or not a school voucher program in Washington, DC, affected achievement or the rate of high school graduation for participating students. The District of Columbia Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP) has operated in the nation's capital since 2004, funded by a federal government appropriation. Because the program was oversubscribed in its early years of operation, and vouchers were awarded by lottery, we were able to use the “gold standard” evaluation method of a randomized experiment to determine what impacts the OSP had on student outcomes. Our analysis revealed compelling evidence that the DC voucher program had a positive impact on high school graduation rates, suggestive evidence that the program increased reading achievement, and no evidence that it affected math achievement. We discuss the implications of these findings in light of recent policy developments including the reauthorization of the OSP and the enactment or expansion of more than a dozen school voucher or voucher-type programs throughout the United States in 2011 and 2012.
Article
The Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) is an influential and rapidly growing nationwide network of charter schools serving primarily disadvantaged minority students. Prominent elements of KIPP's educational model include high expectations for student achievement and behavior, and a substantial increase in time in school. KIPP is being watched closely by policy makers and educators as a possible model for urban education, but existing studies of KIPP's effects on students have been subject to methodological limitations, making them less than conclusive. We measure the achievement impacts of forty-one KIPP middle schools across the country, using propensity-score matching to identify traditional public school students with similar characteristics and prior-achievement histories as students who enter KIPP. We find consistently positive and statistically significant impacts of KIPP on student achievement, with larger impacts in math than reading. These impacts persist over four years following admission, and are not driven by attrition of low performers from KIPP schools.
Article
Drawing on a year and a half of ethnographic research in three New York City small high schools, this study examines the role of the school in managing school choice and asks what social processes are associated with principals’ disparate approaches. Although district policy did not allow principals to select students based on their performance, two of the three schools in this study circumvented these rules to recruit and retain a population that would meet local accountability targets. This article brings together sensemaking and social network theories to offer a theoretical account of schools’ management of choice in an era of accountability. In doing so, the author demonstrates that principals’ sensemaking about the accountability and choice systems occurred within the interorganizational networks in which they were embedded and was strongly conditioned by their own professional biographies and worldviews. Principals’ networks offered access to resources that could be activated to make sense of the accountability and choice systems. How principals perceived accountability and choice policies influenced whether they activated their social networks for assistance in strategically managing the choice process, as well as how they made sense of advice available to them through these networks. Once activated, principals’ networks provided uneven access to instrumental and expressive resources. Taken together, these results suggest that schools respond to accountability and choice plans in varied ways that are not simply a function of their short-term incentives.
Article
Argues that the formal structure of many organizations in post-industrial society dramatically reflect the myths of their institutional environment instead of the demands of their work activities. The authors review prevailing theories of the origins of formal structures and the main problem which those theories confront -- namely, that their assumption that successful coordination and control of activity are responsible for the rise of modern formal organization is not substantiated by empirical evidence. Rather, there is a great gap between the formal structure and the informal practices that govern actual work activities. The authors present an alternative source for formal structures by suggesting that myths embedded in the institutional environment help to explain the adoption of formal structures. Earlier sources understood bureaucratization as emanating from the rationalization of the workplace. Nevertheless, the observation that some formal practices are not followed in favor of other unofficial ones indicates that not all formal structures advance efficiency as a rationalized system would require. Therefore another source of legitimacy is required. This is found in conforming the organization's structure to that of the powerful myths that institutionalized products, services, techniques, policies, and programs become. (CAR)
Article
Market reforms in education are part of the educational policy landscape in many countries. Central to arguments for market reforms is the idea that competition and choice will spur changes in schools to be more innovative, which in turn will lead to better student outcomes. We define innovation in terms of a practice's relative prevalence in a local district context. A charter school is innovative in its use of a practice if the traditional public schools in its local school district are not using that practice. We explore factors based on arguments for charter schools that may affect a charter schools’ propensity toward innovation to explain variation in levels of innovation across charter schools. We find that, on the whole, charter schools do not fulfill their promise of innovation. Teacher tenure is the most notable exception. Parental involvement is the only characteristic of charter schools that significantly predicts variation in levels of organizational innovativeness.
Article
Since their inception, charter schools have been a lighting rod for controversy, with much of the debate revolving around their effectiveness in improving student achievement. Previous research has shown mixed results for student achievement; this could be the consequence of different policy environments or varying methodological approaches with differing assumptions across studies. In our analysis, we discuss these approaches and their assumptions and estimate charter school achievement effects using a consistent methodology across seven locations.
Article
Charter schools elevate choice and competition to foster educational innovations. Indeed, these market-style mechanisms are intended to challenge standardized practices associated with district administration of schools. However, a comprehensive review of practices in charter schools indicates that, although some organizational innovations are evident, classroom strategies tend toward the familiar. Drawing on organizational and economic theory, this article considers the forces shaping educational innovation in market-oriented reforms. Although reformers assume that competition and choice necessarily lead to innovations within schools, a more complex examination of competitive institutional environments suggests that mechanisms employed by reformers may actually undercut their intended purposes. The discussion highlights the potential for choice and competition to constrain opportunities for educational innovation and to impose pedagogical and curricular conformity.
Article
This paper discusses conceptual and methodological issues that a-rise when educational researchers use data from large-scale, survey research to examine the effects of teachers and teaching on student achievement. Using data from Prospects: The Congressionally Mandated Study of Educational Growth and Opportunity 1991-1994, we show that researchers' use of different statistical models has led to widely varying interpretations about the overall magnitude of teacher effects on student achievement. However, we conclude that in well-specified models of academic growth, teacher effects on elementary school students' growth in reading and mathematics achievement are substantial (with d-type effect sizes ranging from .72 to .85). We also conclude that various characteristics of teachers and their teaching account for these effects, including variation among teachers in professional preparation and content knowledge, use of teaching routines, and Patterns of content coverage, with effect sizes for variables measuring these characteristics of teachers and their teaching showing d-type effect sizes in the range of .10. The paper concludes with an assessment of the current state of the art in large-scale, survey research on teaching. Here, we conclude that survey researchers must simultaneously improve their measures of instruction while paying careful attention to issues of causal inference.
Article
I utilize longitudinal data covering all public school students in Florida to study the performance of charter schools and their competitive impact on traditional public schools. Controlling for student-level fixed effects, I find achievement initially is lower in charters. However, by their fifth year of operation new charter schools reach a par with the average traditional public school in math and produce higher reading achievement scores than their traditional public school counterparts. Among charters, those targeting at-risk and special education students demonstrate lower student achievement, while charter schools managed by for-profit entities peform no differently on average than charters run by nonprofits. Controlling for preexisting traditional public school quality, competition from charter schools is associated with modest increases in math scores and unchanged reading scores in nearby traditional public schools. © 2006 American Education Finance Association
Book
Long a fruitful area of scrutiny for students of organizations, the study of institutions is undergoing a renaissance in contemporary social science. This volume offers, for the first time, both often-cited foundation works and the latest writings of scholars associated with the "institutional" approach to organization analysis. In their introduction, the editors discuss points of convergence and disagreement with institutionally oriented research in economics and political science, and locate the "institutional" approach in relation to major developments in contemporary sociological theory. Several chapters consolidate the theoretical advances of the past decade, identify and clarify the paradigm's key ambiguities, and push the theoretical agenda in novel ways by developing sophisticated arguments about the linkage between institutional patterns and forms of social structure. The empirical studies that followinvolving such diverse topics as mental health clinics, art museums, large corporations, civil-service systems, and national politiesillustrate the explanatory power of institutional theory in the analysis of organizational change. Required reading for anyone interested in the sociology of organizations, the volume should appeal to scholars concerned with culture, political institutions, and social change.