The hallmark of a successful education system is increasing or maintaining high student achievement. RAND research measures the effects of various types of school reforms on student achievement, with recent studies focusing on charter schools, No Child Left Behind, reform-oriented teaching, and classroom sizes.
Journal Article
Describes the Project on Incentives in Teaching (POINT), a three-year study intended to assess the effect of financial rewards for teachers whose students showed unusually large gains on standardized tests.
Project
The California Preschool Study sought to understand achievement gaps among the state's children, whether existing preschool education programs is adequate, and what efficiencies could be achieved through public funding of early childhood education.
Journal Article
This paper examines the impact of a gifted program on retention in an urban school district using a regression discontinuity design.
Journal Article
It is unclear if vouchers increase educational productivity or are purely redistributive, benefiting recipients by giving them access to more desirable peers at others' expense. To examine this, the authors study an educational voucher programme in Colombia which allocated vouchers by lottery.
Journal Article
This study capitalizes on a natural experiment that occurred in California between 2000 and 2002.
Journal Article
However, investigating the process of expectation formation back to the elementary grades yields insights not evident when analyses are limited to the high school years.
Research Brief
RAND researchers found no evidence that traditional teacher qualification standards have a substantial effect on student achievement in Los Angeles public schools. Other measures and reward systems might be better at improving teacher quality.
Journal Article
A number of factors account for the failure of performance assessment to capture a large role in achievement testing in the U.S., and this history can inform educators and education policymakers looking for better ways to test students and schools in an era of standards-based accountability.
Report
The Community Foundation of Shreveport-Bossier selected education, health, and poverty as the focus for funding related to children and families. This framework helps the Foundation prioritize investments by identifying the intersection of local needs, community assets, and national best practices.
Report
Examines the contribution of family, school, and neighborhood factors to the racial achievement gap in education.
Report
Examines the effects of family process variables (specific things families do) and family status variables (who families are) on the academic achievement and nonacademic outcomes of students, both in the United States and internationally.
Journal Article
Addresses complex issues related to teacher assessment and teacher quality.
Journal Article
Based on findings from two federally funded studies--the Study of State Implementation of Accountability and Teacher Quality Under NCLB (SSI-NCLB) and the National Longitudinal Study of NCLB (NLS-NCLB)--this report describes the progress that states, districts, and schools have made in implementing the accountability provisions of NCLB through 2006-07.
Journal Article
This report presents findings from the first year of District Awards for Teacher Excellence (D.A.T.E.) (2008-09 school year), with emphasis on program participation decisions made by districts, the local design preferences for performance pay plans, and the early implementation experiences of D.A.T.E. participants.
Journal Article
Although reading coaches are increasingly prevalent in schools nationwide, empirical evidence for their effects on student achievement is scarce. This article helps to address this gap by conducting an evaluation of a statewide reading coach program in Florida middle schools.
Journal Article
This study takes advantage of a unique data set from Senegal that combines test score data for children from the second grade with information on their subsequent school progression from a follow-up survey conducted seven years later.
Journal Article
Standardized, large-scale tests of student achievement have been given a central role in federal, state, and local efforts to improve K-12 education.
Journal Article
This paper studies student participation and achievement in two Pittsburgh Public Schools (PPS) tutoring programs--the No Child Left Behind (NCLB)-mandated supplemental education services (SES) program and a state-developed tutoring program. The authors examine the characteristics of students participating in each program, the effects of participation on student achievement, and the program features that are associated with improved achievement.
Journal Article
This article reports on the economic factors that influenced academic achievement for elementary school students in public housing in Montgomery County, Maryland. It argues that economic integration in housing and school policy is vital to student success.
Journal Article
This paper uses linked household, school, and test score data from Madagascar to investigate the relation of household characteristics and school factors to the cognitive skills of children ages 8 to 10 and 14 to 16.
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