Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis

In the early 1990s, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system (CMS) began a sweeping program of school reform that involved revamped standards, a comprehensive system of benchmark goals, increased autonomy for principals, and a high-stakes accountability system. This program has been lauded in prestigious education journals, praised by reform advocates in business and government, and cited as a model in a recently published handbook of school reform. Such national publicity notwithstanding, there has been no systematic investigation of the effects of CMS's program on academic outcomes. This article provides such an assessment by comparing CMS's progress in improving outcomes for both Black and White students with that of two other North Carolina urban districts and the state itself. With the exception of some outcomes for Advanced Placement (AP) and other higher level courses, we find no evidence that CMS's program improved academic outcomes. Trends in CMS's dropout rate—one of North Carolina's highest—generally paralleled those of the controls as did trends in SAT scores and proficiency in core high school courses. Moreover, CMS's progress in improving reading and math proficiency in Grades 3–8 lagged behind the controls'. Finally, racial imbalance in CMS increased during this time period. The many shortfalls of CMS's program raise questions whose answers will further the national dialogue about school reform and the role of standards, accountability, and assessment in such reform.

We empirically test how 12th-grade students of teachers with probationary certification, emergency certification, private school certification, or no certification in their subject area compare relative to students of teachers who have standard certification in their subject area. We also determine whether specific state-by-state differences in teacher licensure requirements systematically affect student achievement. In mathematics, we find teachers who have a standard certification have a statistically significant positive impact on student test scores relative to teachers who either hold private school certification or are not certified in their subject area. Contrary to conventional wisdom, mathematics and science students who have teachers with emergency credentials do no worse than students whose teachers have standard teaching credentials.

This paper investigates how enrollment size influences two organizational features of schools: curriculum and social relations. We interview teachers, principals, guidance counselors, and students in six public high schools (large and small schools in urban, suburban, and rural locations) and three schools of choice: two Catholic schools (one large, one small) and a small public school. All school members saw size as important. In small schools, student head counts translated directly into revenue that "bought" faculty and facilities. In large schools, members worried about anonymity. Social relations were more personal in the small high schools, although sometimes to students' detriment. Curriculum offerings in the small public schools, necessarily modest, were targeted toward the middle of the ability distribution. Although students in the large and small public schools were free to choose among a broad array of courses, the Catholic high schools offered a mostly academic curriculum to all students. Policy issues, especially about making schools smaller and basing the high school curriculum on a full "student choice model," are discussed.

Can educational mechanisms lower social tension and help achieve social cohesion ? If so, how are these mechanisms defined and measured? What is the experience to date with the social utility of education mechanisms? How can one differentiate between an education system that is doing a good job of rein- forcing social cohesion and one that is doing a poor job? In this paper, I attempt to respond to these questions by (a) briefly reviewing some concepts of institutional and organizational economics so that the economic implications of education's social cohesion functions can be more clear, (b) reviewing the origins of public schooling so that the reader may place today's educational challenges in historical context, (c) reviewing the anecdotal and field experience to date in the European and Central Asian (ECA ) region in meeting the challenges of social cohesion, and (d) drawing some comparisons between the social cohesion performance of education systems in the ECA region and that of the U.S. In sum, I argue that social cohesion has significant economic benefits; that since its invention in the 17th century, public education has been one of the main contributions to social cohesion in the west; but that countries of the ECA region are having a difficult time replicating the western education experience. In fact, when compared to other parts of the world, the U.S. school system seems to perform rather well with respect to its social cohesion functions.

This article describes how school decentralization and restructuring policy in Israel is viewed by principals of autonomous schools. Like many western countries, the Israeli school system is going through reforms that include decentralization policies and school empowerment. Autonomous schools (Israel's version of restructuring) are the center of decentralization policy. In Israel, unlike some other countries, decentralization is characterized by informal changes, seldom accompanied by legislation, and therefore not followed by open public debate. This paper presents the results of a qualitative study among 50 principals of autonomous schools in Israel that explored the principals' insights or ‚mindscapes’ (Sergiovanni, 1995) concerning decentralization and restructuring policy in Israel. The findings shed light on the possibilities and hardships that these principals face and on the complexity of implementing decentralization policies.