Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis

Policymakers are implementing reforms with the assumption that students do better when attending high-achieving schools. In this article, we use longitudinal data from Chicago Public Schools to test that assumption. We find that the effects of attending a higher performing school depend on the school’s performance level. At elite public schools with admission criteria, there are no academic benefits—test scores are not better, grades are lower—but students report better environments. In contrast, forgoing a very low-performing school for a nonselective school with high test scores and graduation rates improves a range of academic and nonacademic outcomes.

We find evidence of enrollment increases in both Syracuse and Buffalo following the announcement of a placed-based scholarship program, Say Yes to Education. While the Syracuse increases were accompanied by enrollment declines in surrounding suburban districts, the Buffalo increases coincided with declines in private school enrollments. Buffalo and Rochester also saw enrollment increases relative to trends following the announcement of Say Yes in Syracuse, suggesting that part of the increase in Syracuse might be attributable to factors other than Say Yes. We also find evidence of increases in home prices in Syracuse after the program’s announcement, as well as decreases in the surrounding suburbs. We do not find evidence of similar housing price changes in Buffalo.

One critical factor in policy implementation is how teachers interpret policy. Previous research largely overlooks how the broader culture shapes teachers’ interpretations. In the current research, we explore how teachers’ interpretations of instructional reforms are associated with the logics of broad societal institutions. Our longitudinal mixed-methods study of 117 teachers at three urban public schools demonstrates that teachers’ interpretations are rooted in market accountability logics, professional bureaucracy logics, and communal sentiment logics. Teachers’ logics partially depend on their school and community contexts. The most substantive differences in teachers’ logics result from individual attributes, namely, race/ethnicity. One implication is that effective policy implementation depends on formulation and framing that address the multiple and potentially competing logics that motivate teachers’ responses to reform.

Many states require prospective principals to pass a licensure exam to obtain an administrative license, but we know little about the potential effects of principal licensure exams on the pool of available principals or whether scores predict later job performance. We investigate the most commonly used exam, the School Leaders Licensure Assessment (SLLA), using 10 years of data on Tennessee test takers. We uncover substantial differences in passage rates by test-taker characteristics. In particular, non-Whites are 12 percentage points less likely than otherwise similar White test takers to attain the required licensure score. Although candidates with higher scores are more likely to be hired as principals, we find little evidence that SLLA scores predict measures of principal job performance, including supervisors’ evaluation ratings or teachers’ assessments of school leadership from a statewide survey. Our results raise questions about whether conditioning administrative licensure on SLLA passage is consistent with principal workforce diversity goals.

As state and federal policymakers continue to adopt more centralized policies, it is increasingly important to understand how policies, particularly those designed to enhance education for underserved students, are implemented locally. We employ a mixed-methods sequential explanatory design to investigate the implementation of one policy, that which guides the process of reclassifying English learners (ELs) as English proficient in Texas. First, we use event history analysis to determine whether the likelihood of being reclassified differs across the state for similar ELs. Second, we utilize interview and observation data from eight schools to unpack how practitioners implement reclassification policy. We find differences in the hazard rate of reclassification across the state, which is linked to practitioners’ understanding of the policy.

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) requires states to identify and turn around struggling schools, with federal school improvement money required to fund evidence-based policies. Most research on turnarounds has focused on individual schools, whereas studies of district-wide turnarounds have come from relatively exceptional settings and interventions. We study a district-wide turnaround of a type that may become more common under ESSA, an accountability-driven state takeover of Massachusetts’s Lawrence Public Schools (LPS). A differences-in-differences framework comparing LPS to demographically similar districts not subject to state takeover shows that the turnaround’s first 2 years produced sizable achievement gains in math and modest gains in reading. We also find no evidence that the turnaround resulted in slippage on nontest score outcomes and suggestive evidence of positive effects on grade progression among high school students. Intensive small-group instruction over vacation breaks may have led to particularly large achievement gains for participating students.

This article examines the impacts of the Michigan Merit Curriculum (MMC), a statewide college-preparatory curriculum that applies to the high school graduating class of 2011 and later. Our analyses suggest that the higher expectations embodied in the MMC had slight impact on student outcomes. Looking at student performance in the ACT, the only clear evidence of a change in academic performance comes in science. Our best estimates indicate that ACT science scores improved by 0.2 points (or roughly 0.04 SD) as a result of the MMC. Our estimates for high school completion are sensitive to the choice of specification, though some evidence suggests that the MMC reduced graduation for the least prepared students.

Research increasingly points to the importance of parental engagement in children’s education. Yet, little research has investigated whether prompting parents to be more involved in college processes improves student outcomes. We investigate experimentally whether providing both students and their parents with personalized outreach about tasks students need to complete to enroll in college leads to improved college enrollment outcomes relative to providing outreach to students only. We utilize text messaging to provide information and advising to students and parents. Across treatment arms, the text outreach increased on-time college enrollment by a statistically significant 3.1 percentage points. Texting both parents and students, however, did not increase the efficacy of the outreach. We situate this result in the broader parental engagement literature.