Education Policy Commons^™

Surprise! You Are Accepted To College: An Analysis Of Idaho's Direct Admissions Initiative, Carson Howell

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

In an effort to improve the rate at which Idahoans ‘go on’ to postsecondary education, Idaho launched an initiative called Direct Admissions in the fall of 2015. This initiative informed students and their parents that the student had already been accepted to at least six of Idaho’s public colleges and universities, even before the student had applied. Although the students still needed to apply, the letters guaranteed the student a seat at any of the colleges listed in their Direct Admissions letter. The goal of the initiative was to encourage students to enroll in one of Idaho’s public colleges or …

Mindset, Mentor, And Money: How Each Influences College Success, Malachi Nichols

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Across society, the consistent influx of students enrolling in higher education institutions without a comparable increase in degree attainment has produced a heightened awareness and a desire to identify the factors related to influencing college success. This dissertation aims to develop a greater understanding of three potentially relevant factors and their respective influences in facilitating college success at the University of Arkansas. First, I evaluate the Student Talent Enrichment Program (STEP) Grant program, designed to fulfill low-income first-year students’ financial needs and encourage their persistence on to their second year of college. Second, I study the effectiveness of the BounceBack …

Principal Leaders And College And Career Readiness Programs, Inna Goretaya Polishchuk

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the intersection of high school principals and college and career readiness initiatives in five high school contexts. Because school principals are responsible for setting the vision in a school, college and career readiness initiatives have the potential to overlap significantly with the principal’s direction of the school. Moreover, studies indicate college and career readiness programs might rely on the active support of the school administrator if they are to succeed. What the school leader cares about tends to be what staff focus on; therefore, this study examines how three factors influence the effectiveness of a college and …

The Growing Need For Diverse Teachers In The Mountain West, Michael Hansen, Diana Quintero

Brookings Mountain West Publications

This policy brief examines the racial and ethnic diversity of the public teacher workforce in five Mountain West states, drawing on survey data from 1993 to 2016. We find increases in student diversity are generally outpacing teacher diversity in the region, though important differences in teacher-student parity and access to nonwhite teachers across states are also evident. In addition, we demonstrate the recruitment and retention of nonwhite teachers in these states lag considerably behind the rest of the U.S. This brief concludes with recommendations to help Mountain West states and districts promote greater racial and ethnic diversity among their teacher …

High-Growth High Schools In Arkansas Based On Performance On The Act Aspire Examinations, Charlene A. Reid, Sarah C. Mckenzie

Arkansas Education Reports

This section highlights high schools across the state whose students demonstrated high growth on the Arkansas ACT Aspire exams. The ACT Aspire was administered to students in grades 3 through 10 in April 2018 in Math and ELA courses which include English, Writing, and Reading.

Charter School Funding: (More) Inequity In The City, Corey A. Deangelis, Patrick J. Wolf, Larry D. Maloney, Jay F. May

School Choice Demonstration Project

Public charter schools are a growing part of K-12 education. Charter schools are public schools that are granted operational autonomy by their authorizing agency in return for a commitment to achieve performance levels specified in a contract. Like traditional public schools, charter schools are prohibited from charging tuition, must not discriminate in admissions or be religious in their operation or affiliation, and are overseen by a public entity. Unlike traditional public schools, however, most charters are open to all students who wish to apply, regardless of where they live. If a charter school is over-subscribed, random lotteries usually determine which …

One University’S Response To Sections 504 And 508 Of The Rehabilitation Act: A Descriptive Case Study Of Policy Design, Kimberly F. Carter

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Pioneering legislation such as Sections 504 and 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act of 1997, and the Assistive Technology Act of 1998 have increased attention to the needs of individuals with disabilities. These regulations require that public programs and services are accessible to people with disabilities (Griffin, 2004).

This descriptive case study examines policy design to conform with Sections 504 and 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 at a public research university through the lens of Bolman and Deal’s four frames of organizational analysis. These …

High-Growth Middle Schools In Arkansas Based On Performance On The Act Aspire Examinations, Charlene A. Reid, Sarah C. Mckenzie

Arkansas Education Reports

This section highlights middle schools across the state whose students demonstrated high growth on the Arkansas ACT Aspire exams. The ACT Aspire was administered to students in grades 3 through 10 in April 2018 in Math and ELA courses which include English, Writing, and Reading.

The Critical Need For Mental Health Education To Be Mandated In New Mexico's Public Schools, Bonnie L. Murphy

Shared Knowledge Conference

Based on a review of research and best practices in mental health awareness and skills, this inquiry project argues for state legislative policies that would require mental health awareness and skills in the K-12 curriculum. Mental health affects individual accomplishments in every stage of people’s lives beginning in early childhood and throughout the life cycle. Prevention and treatment of mental illness plays a key role in the ability of an individual to cope with loss and develop resiliency and perseverance in challenging times and to make better decisions that improve the individual’s life and the lives of those around them. …

High-Growth Elementary Schools In Arkansas Based On Performance On The Act Aspire Examinations, Charlene A. Reid, Sarah C. Mckenzie

Arkansas Education Reports

This section highlights elementary schools across the state whose students demonstrated high growth on the Arkansas ACT Aspire exams. The ACT Aspire was administered to students in grades 3 through 10 in April 2018 in Math and ELA courses which include English, Writing, and Reading.

Multilayered Analyses Of The Experiences Of Undocumented Latinx College Students, Yue Shi, Laura E. Jimenez-Arista, Joshua Cruz, Terrence S. Mctier Jr., Mirka Koro-Ljungberg

The Qualitative Report

Being the target of constant discrimination and marginalization can often cause intense negative psychological reactions and shame for undocumented students. The following qualitative study describes past and current undocumented Latinx students’ experiences of educational inequality in higher education influenced by labels associated with “being undocumented.” In this study we used a constructivist theoretical perspective which enabled us to focus on undocumented participants’ perspectives, experiences, meaning-making processes, values, and beliefs. Data was collected through hour-long, semi-structured interviews with five undocumented students. Student narratives were analyzed using a multi-layered analysis approach: (1) narrative, (2) thematic, and (3) critical incident analysis. Findings for …

Diversity Plan: Academic Year 2017/2018 Status Report, Illinois Mathematics Amd Science Academy

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: Resources

Below are some highlights of IMSA’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion work, Academic Year 2017-2018:

• Created Equity and Excellence Policy based on a model of Inclusive Excellence that is now board approved.
• Developed Diverse Fellows program, to be piloted Academic Year 2018-2019.
• Created Diversifying STEM Equity Model.
• Implemented “I am not racist, am I” e-learning curriculum, film and discussion with all juniors, n = 20; 50 faculty/staff were trained to facilitate discussions.
• Conducted a train-the-trainer Safe Zone workshop for 27 faculty/staff, which led to the creation of 68 safe spaces.
• Rolled out Live-Safe app, which promotes student safety and can be …

Money Matters: An Examination Of Special Education Characteristics In Efficient And Inefficient Texas School Districts, Pakethia Harris

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study veers from the traditional perspective of examining school efficiency or productivity as a cost minimizing process, in which educational inputs are minimized to achieve maximum outputs (student performance). Instead, it provides a critical examination of the dominant, cost minimizing assumption associated with efficiency models and suggest schools instead behave similarly to budget maximizers as presented in Niskanen’s (1971) seminal budget maximizing framework. The study examines the relationship between total student expenditures and subsequent student outcomes, establishing the relative efficiency of Texas school districts using stochastic frontier analysis within a budget-maximizing framework. Additionally, the study investigates how special education …

Long-Term Outcomes Of Low-Achieving Third Grade Readers, Emily Jordan, Sarah C. Mckenzie, Gary W. Ritter

Arkansas Education Reports

Research shows that students who demonstrate low reading achievement in 3rd grade have trouble catching back up to grade level and being successful in school, compared to their peers who demonstrate early proficiency (Fiester 2010; Hernandez 2011; Juel 1988). This report seeks to investigate what happens to Arkansas public school students who demonstrate low achievement in reading in 3rd grade. Reading scores from three cohorts of students are followed from 3rd grade until high school, beginning with data from the 2008-09 school year and continuing through 2016-17. We examine the demographic characteristics of the low-achieving group, assess the extent to …

Long-Term Outcomes Of Low Achieving Third Grade Readers, Sarah Mckenzie, Emily Jordan, Charlene A. Reid

Policy Briefs

This brief examines long-term academic outcomes for students who demonstrate low reading achievement in third grade. Following three cohorts of students from third grade through early high school, we find that students who are behind in third grade are unlikely to ever read proficiently. Economically disadvantaged students, Black students, and male students demonstrate less improvement in reading achievement over time than other types of students.

Further Validation Of Survey Effort Measures Of Relevant Character Skills: Results From A Sample Of High School Students, Gema Zamarro, Malachi Nichols, Angela Duckworth, Sidney D'Mello

Education Reform Faculty and Graduate Students Publications

Character skills, including conscientiousness, grit or self-control are important determinants of relevant life outcomes. However, researchers struggle to find valid measures of these skills and many existing datasets lack any measures of them at all. This limits research on how these important skills could be better supported and developed. Recent research has shown the potential of parametrizations of survey effort measures as proxy measures of character skills related to conscientiousness, to either complement other collected measures or to add to datasets that lack such measures. This study provides further validation of these survey effort measures in a sample of high …

Looking Beyond Primary: A Study Of Barriers To Secondary Education In Kiryandongo Refugee Settlement, Uganda, Chloe Schalit

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

The increase in protracted refugee situations around the world complicates the provision of public services such as education. Accessing secondary school is key to individual and community empowerment for vulnerable refugees through providing higher education and employment opportunities. However, secondary school attainment is often severely lacking in refugee settlements. In Uganda, 58.2% of refugees are enrolled in primary school, while only 11.3% attend secondary school. This study sought to understand the experiences of Ugandan refugees related to barriers to secondary education and its relation to social and economic empowerment, as well as solutions that refugee communities, Implementing Partners (IPs), and …

A Multi-Case Study Of Electronic Communication Policy In Rural East Texas School Districts, Laura Lynn Dacus

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this descriptive case study was to conduct a policy analysis regarding electronic communication between educators and students in three rural East Texas school districts. The policy analysis for each district began with the initial implementation of teacher communication via electronic sources provided by the districts. The focus of the study was limited specifically to the policy regulating nonschool related, electronic communication by educators with students. The challenge faced by school districts to embrace technology with one-to-one classrooms, virtual classrooms, constant connectivity, school texting applications, and open availability to teachers via email, complicates restrictions placed on non-school related …

Integrating The Findings From The National Assessment Of Student Achievement Into The Policy Process: An Experience From Nepal, Lekha Nath Poudel, Gopal Prasad Bhattarai

Assessment and Reporting

This paper presents the experiences from Nepal on how the findings from the National Assessment of Student Achievement (NASA) have been integrated into policy processes. The purpose of this brief paper is twofold: to give an overview of the process of the National Assessment of Student Achievement, and to describe how the results were disseminated to different stakeholders to incorporate the findings into the design of policy processes. In doing so, the case study highlights how the assessment findings have been used to design and implement policies and programs in education.

Challenges To Democratic Inclusion And Contestation Of Space: Contemporary Student Activists In Transforming South Africa, Momo Wilms-Crowe

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Twenty-four years into democracy, in a time marked by stark inequality and rising levels of political disillusionment, student activists are key players in the pursuit of a more just, more equitable, and more democratic South Africa. Using universities as spaces to contest, disrupt, and challenge the status quo, student activists challenge narratives of youth political apathy and act as agents of change, encouraging society to meet the goals established in the 1996 Constitution, the document enshrining the very promises they were born into believing would be their reality. Through mobilization and organizing, student actors boldly engage in questions of substantive …

Identifying Naturally-Occurring Direct Assessments Of Social-Emotional Competencies: The Promise And Limitations Of Survey And Assessment Disengagement Metadata, James Soland, Gema Zamarro, Albert Cheng, Colin Hitt

Education Reform Faculty and Graduate Students Publications

Social-emotional learning (SEL) is gaining increasing attention in education policy and practice due to evidence that related constructs are strongly associated with long-term academic achievement and attainment. However, the work of educators to support SEL is hampered by a lack of available, unbiased measures of related competencies. In this manuscript, we review a recent and growing body of literature suggesting that metadata captured when assessments are administered via computer can provide data on not only test engagement, but also SEL constructs. Implications of this new source of data for practice, policy, and research are discussed.

Arkansas Student Discipline Report, Kaitlin Anderson

Arkansas Education Reports

This report examines student discipline in the Arkansas public schools. Using de-identified student- and infraction-level data from 2007-08 to 2016-17 provided by the Arkansas Department of Education, our research identifies trends and a number of key student outcomes related to student discipline in the Arkansas public schools. While the data are only limited to what schools report, there are several meaningful findings from this work.

Arkansas Teacher Supply, Leesa M. Forman, Sarah C. Mckenzie, Gary .W. Ritter

Arkansas Education Reports

There have been widespread reports of an impending teacher shortage crisis in the U.S. for more than 30 years. In the U.S., there are claims of a widespread national shortage while research indicates teacher shortages are specific to certain subjects and schools. Part of the reason for the conflicting accounts is how shortage is identified and what information is used to assess it. In this study, we test whether a uniform teacher shortage exists across the state of Arkansas. We hypothesize that, rather than a universal shortage, teacher shortages are more likely to occur in certain regions and subjects. We …

Arkansas Teacher Supply, Sarah C. Mckenzie

Policy Briefs

This brief examines teacher supply in Arkansas. Using survey data collected in Spring 2017 and data publicly available from the Arkansas Department of Education, we examine how teacher supply varies by district, grade level, and subject across the state. In particular, we examine characteristics associated with the most favorable teaching supply.

Identifying Areas For Change: A Case Study On North Carolina State Public School Performance, Olivia Leeson, Kelly Bean, Jacob Drew

SMU Data Science Review

In this paper, we present a framework to identify school-level factors within North Carolina public school administration’s control that have a positive impact on school performance. Public school administrators struggle to improve the academic performance of their schools, as the most influential factors determining overall school performance are outside of their scope of influence. We consider the current circumstances responsible for poor performance in North Carolina public schools and their implications for future academic improvement. Our framework utilizes an extreme gradient boosting model to predict school performance scores using only school-level features that administrators can impact. By varying the inputs, …

Different Choices: A Public School Community’S Responses To School Choice Reforms, Amanda U. Potterton

The Qualitative Report

In the United States, state and federal reforms increasingly encourage the expansion of school choice policies. Debates about school choice contrast various concepts of freedom and equality with concerns about equity, justice, achievement, democratic accountability, profiting management organizations, and racial and class segregation. Arizona’s “market”-based school choice programs include over 600 charter schools, and the state’s open enrollment practices, public and private school tax credit allowances, and Empowerment Scholarships, (closely related to vouchers), flourish. This qualitative analysis explores one district-run public school and its surrounding community, and I discuss socio-political and cultural tensions related to school choice reforms that exist …

Knappa School District Enrollment Forecast 2018-19 To 2027-28, Portland State University. Population Research Center, Charles Rynerson

School District Enrollment Forecast Reports

This report presents district-wide enrollment forecasts by grade level for the Knappa School District for the 20 year period between 2007-08 and 2027-28. The report also includes the population, housing, social and economic profile Knappa School District 1 as well as the 2000 and 2010 census profile for the school district.

Examining The Meaning Of Course Evaluation, Tyesha Stewart

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Teaching evaluations significantly influence faculty members’ annual evaluations and progress toward tenure and promotion within academic programs in higher education. Those with consistently strong, positive, teaching evaluations have been deemed effective instructors and often validated with increases in salary, teaching awards, and promotion and tenure. This is especially the case when strong course evaluations are received in addition to documented scholarship and research activities and positively evaluated professional service. However, questions are being raised about the meaningfulness of students' ratings of course instruction. Do these measures effectively assess competence as instructors or do they measure other unknown processes in the …

Portland Public Schools Enrollment Forecasts, 2018-19 To 2032-33: Based On October 2017 Enrollments, Portland State University. Population Research Center, Charles Rynerson, Joshua Ollinger

School District Enrollment Forecast Reports

This report presents the results of a demographic study conducted by the Portland State University Population Research Center (PRC) for Portland Public Schools (PPS). The study includes analysis of population, housing and enrollment trends affecting the District in recent years, estimates of the number of PPS students by housing type, and annual forecasts of enrollment for a 15 year horizon, from 2018‐19 to 2032‐33. Enrollment forecasts were prepared under high, middle, and low scenarios for the District. Forecasts for attendance areas by place of residence and for individual schools are consistent with the middle district‐wide forecast.

The ‘Just City’ Or Just A City? : Evaluating Social Justice And Equity In Planning Education., Wes Grooms

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Contemporary evaluations of accredited planning education performance have eschewed the principles and methodologies of formal program evaluation and performance management. This dissertation tests hypotheses that this contributes to the lack of social equity and justice commitment, content, and inquiry on the part of accredited graduate planning degree programs, their clients, and administrators. The organizations, resources, and processes involved in the purveyance of accredited graduate planning education were conceptualized as a singular, evaluable program and illustrated in a series of program logic models. These models revealed sources of the inattentiveness to normative issues that past evaluations have evidenced, and informed assertions …