Although teacher quality is a key part of student academic success, it has been challenging to understand how various measures of quality relate to student achievement and which students are exposed to quality teachers. For example, how does teacher quality vary across classrooms and across schools? Do traditional measures of teacher quality, such as experience, educational preparation, and success on licensure exams, explain teachers’ classroom results?
A RAND Corporation study sought to answer these questions by analyzing five years of math and reading standardized tests and other records from more than 700,000 students in elementary, middle, and high school in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). The data linked individual students to their classroom teachers each year, allowing researchers to examine student progress from year to year in different classrooms with different teachers. These data were then compared with teacher-specific information, including licensure test scores for new teachers and other traditional measures of teacher quality, such as degrees obtained and years of experience.
The results show that there is little evidence that “good” teachers—in terms of those that improve student achievement—are concentrated in only a few “good” schools; in fact, such teachers are evenly distributed throughout LAUSD, and the teacher quality gap between low- and high-performing schools is only about one percentage point.
Traditional teacher qualifications also have little influence on classroom achievement—a five-year increase in experience affected student achievement very little (less than one percentage point), and the level of education held by a teacher proved to have no effect on student achievement.
Finally, the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing requires new teachers to pass up to three licensure tests covering general aptitude, subject-matter knowledge, and reading instruction competency. But the researchers found no relationship between student achievement and teachers’ licensure test scores. If a candidate fails one or all of these licensure examinations on the first attempt, he or she may opt to retake one or all them. Researchers analyzed whether failing an exam before later passing it was related to student achievement and again found no statistically significant link.
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What Teacher Characteristics Affect Student Achievement? Findings from the Los Angeles Public Schools
What We Know About the Impact of Charter Schools
The creation of charter schools is one of the most prominent and far-reaching policies enacted to increase family choice in the nation’s elementary and secondary schools, and charter schools have been among the fastest-growing segments of the K–12 education sector over the past decade. Charter schools are publicly funded schools that parents can choose and that have the flexibility to operate outside normal district control. They are designed to provide greater educational choice to families, reduce bureaucratic constraints on educators, and provide competitive pressure to induce improvement in conventional public schools, all while remaining publicly accountable.
The growth of charter schools raises a host of issues, including how well such schools achieve relative to traditional public schools and the ways in which the specific design of charter school policy—such as funding levels and limitations, admissions policies, academic standards and assessments, and accountability—determine the nature and extent of any specific school’s impact. Unfortunately, because the debate over charter schools is highly charged, much of the discussion of these issues is driven by the rhetoric of proponents and critics of charter schools rather than the schools’ actual performance.
Over the years, RAND Corporation researchers have added clarity to the debate about charter schools by creating a comprehensive assessment of charter schools that reviewed the theoretical foundations for them and the empirical evidence of their effectiveness as set forth in hundreds of recent reports and studies.
California has been one of the key focuses of such studies. Research has examined how California charter schools operate and perform, systematically assessed various dimensions of charter school performance and their effects on traditional public schools in California, and examined the impact of California Senate Bill 740, which was passed to strengthen the oversight of nonclassroom-based charter schools and implement funding cutbacks for schools that failed to meet spending standards. RAND also testified in 2006 before the California Select Committee on the Master Plan for Education on RAND’s assessments of the effectiveness of California charter schools.
RAND’s most recent research on this topic examined charter schools in a number of cities in eight states—including California—that use individual student-level data to track students from school to school over time and to measure their test scores in both traditional and charter schools. The analysis shows that charter schools do have some positive effects on high school student attainment and do not produce the predicted negative effects, such as “skimming” white or higher-achieving students away from public schools. The federal government can play an important role by supporting investigations that track individual students over time and examine outcomes beyond just test scores, enabling best practices to be identified that can improve charter school performance.
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The Role of Charter Schools in Improving Education
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Making Sense of Charter Schools: Evidence from California
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Assessing the Effects of California Charter Schools
How Available Is Drinking Water in California Public Schools?
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In testimony before the Subcommittee on Education for the California State Assembly in April 2008, RAND researcher Mark Schuster discussed work he and his colleagues conducted in the Los Angeles Unified School District on preventing obesity by developing a middle school program to promote healthy eating and physical activity. The research found that students have limited access to drinking water, especially at meals, in the school being studied. The researchers note that schools, communities, and policymakers should collaborate to develop programs and policies to ensure that free, clean, and palatable water is available to students. |
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Availability of Drinking Water in California Public Schools
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Perceptions About Availability and Adequacy of Drinking Water in a Large California School District
