0

Eric.ed.gov – Money and Freedom: The Impact of California’s School Finance Reform on Academic Achievement and the Composition of District Spending. Technical Report. Getting Down to Facts II

eric.ed.gov har udgivet: California’s recent major school finance reform, the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF), attempts to address resource inequity by reallocating school finances on the basis of student disadvantage (rather than district property wealth) and relinquishing many of the restrictions on how revenue can be spent. Beyond a uniform “base grant” given to all districts, the LCFF reallocates additional district revenues based almost entirely on the proportion of disadvantaged students (e.g., low-income, limited English proficiency) in each district. We show LCFF significantly increased per-pupil spending, and the state now has among the most progressive funding formulas in the country. This study is among the first to provide evidence of LCFF’s impacts on student outcomes. For cohorts born between 1990 and 2000, we constructed a school-by-cohort-level panel data set of… Continue Reading

0

Eric.ed.gov – Do Poor Kids Deserve Lower-Quality Education than Rich Kids? Evaluating School Privatization Proposals in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. EPI Briefing Paper #375

eric.ed.gov har udgivet: During the past year, Wisconsin state legislators debated a series of bills aimed at closing low-performing public schools and replacing them with privately run charter schools. These proposals were particularly targeted at Milwaukee, the state’s largest and poorest school district. Ultimately, the only legislation enacted was a bill that modestly increases school reporting requirements, without stipulating consequences for low performance. Nevertheless, the more ambitious proposals will likely remain at the core of Wisconsin’s debates over education policy, and legislative leaders have made clear their desire to revisit them in next year’s session. To help inform these deliberations, this report addresses the most comprehensive set of reforms put forward in the 2013-2014 legislative session. Backers of these reforms are particularly enamored of a new type of charter school… Continue Reading

0

Eric.ed.gov – The Impact of Incentives on Effort: Teacher Bonuses in North Carolina. Program on Education Policy and Governance Working Papers Series. PEPG 10-06

eric.ed.gov har udgivet: Teacher effort, a critical component of education production, has been largely ignored in the literature due to measurement difficulties. Using a principal-agent model, North Carolina public school data, and the state’s unique accountability system that rewards teachers for school-level academic growth, we show that we can distill effort from teacher absence data and capture its effect on student achievement in a structural framework. We find that: (1) Incentives lead teachers to try harder. The bonus program reduced the number of sick days taken by about 0.6 days for an average teacher; (2) When teachers try harder, students do better. Increased effort of teachers translates into improved student performance. Estimates show that standardized reading scores increased by about 1.3% of a standard deviation and standardized math scores by… Continue Reading