Brookings Papers on Education Policy最新文献

{"title":"High School Size, Organization, and Content: What Matters for Student Success?","authors":"L. Darling-Hammond, Peter A. Ross, M. Milliken","doi":"10.1353/PEP.2007.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/PEP.2007.0001","url":null,"abstract":"In recent years, the large comprehensive high school has been a sub ject of growing c itique by researchers and reformers. \"Factory model\" schools have been criticized for their impersonal structures, fragmented curricula, segregated and unequal program options, and inability to respond effectively to student needs.1 Some studies have found that, other things equal, smaller schools appear to produce higher achievement, lower dropout rates, lower rates of violence and vandalism, more positive feelings about self and school, and more participation in school activities. These outcomes appear more pronounced for students who are traditionally lower achieving.2 In addi tion, the belief that large schools are necessarily more cost-effective has been challenged by studies finding equivalent operating costs and lower costs per graduate in smaller schools.3 However, there are competing findings about the effects of smaller schools for different groups of students and about the effects of school size and orga nizational features in diverse contexts. This review examines these findings across a wide range of studies over the last thirty years. We conclude that the influences of size appear to be mediated by other features of school organiza tions that are sometimes, but not always, associated with size, making the relationship between school size and many desired outcomes an indirect one. These other features are associated with aspects of school design, including how adults and students are organized to work together, the nature of the cur","PeriodicalId":9272,"journal":{"name":"Brookings Papers on Education Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74328016","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"School Consolidation and Inequality","authors":"Christopher R. Berry","doi":"10.1353/PEP.2007.0000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/PEP.2007.0000","url":null,"abstract":"One of the most remarkable yet least remarked upon accomplishments in American public education in the twentieth century is the success of the school consolidation movement. Between 1930 and 1970, 9 out of every 10 school districts were eliminated through consolidation. Nearly two-thirds of schools that existed as of 1930 were gone by 1970. The overall effect of these and related reforms was to transform the small, informal, community controlled schools of the 19th century into centralized, professionally run educational bureaucracies. The American public school system as we know it was born during this brief, dynamic period. While school consolidation represents arguably the most profound reform movement in 20th century education, almost nothing is known about its consequences for students. In earlier work on the consolidation movement (Berry and West, 2005), Martin West and I found that students educated in systems with larger schools earned significantly lower wages as adults. Like many others who have studied the relationship between school attributes and student outcomes, we focused our attention on average outcomes. However, there is good reason to suspect that school consolidation influenced the variation in student outcomes as well. In particular, by dramatically cutting the number of schools and districts, consolidation reduced an important source of betweenschool and between-district variation in educational quality. At the same time, however, consolidation was motivated by a desire to increase instructional specialization, which could be achieved by substantially increasing the size of schools and districts. Thus, within-school and within-district variation in education quality may have risen as schools and districts became larger and instruction more specialized. This paper investigates the relationship between changes in school and district size and variation in student outcomes, as measured by adult wage inequality.","PeriodicalId":9272,"journal":{"name":"Brookings Papers on Education Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90564393","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Introduction: What Do We Know about School Size and Class Size?","authors":"Tom Loveless, Tom Hess","doi":"10.1353/PEP.2007.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/PEP.2007.0005","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":9272,"journal":{"name":"Brookings Papers on Education Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73711803","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Policy from the Hip: Class Size Reduction in California","authors":"P. Schrag","doi":"10.1353/PEP.2007.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/PEP.2007.0009","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: In the spring of 1996, California Gov. Pete Wilson pushed a class size reduction plan through the state legislature to limit all classes in grades K-3 to 20 students in a state where many had 30 or more students. With one significant exception, there was little research to support such a sweeping plan, a point Wilson himself had made when he opposed CSR earlier in his administration. But Wilson, faced with a constitutional requirement to put a large part of the state’s new revenues into the schools, and wanting to keep the money off the union bargaining table, prevailed over the warnings of skeptics to go slow.","PeriodicalId":9272,"journal":{"name":"Brookings Papers on Education Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75153189","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Effects of School Size on Parental Involvement and Social Capital: Evidence from the ELS: 2002","authors":"T. Dee, Wei Ha, B. Jacob","doi":"10.1353/PEP.2007.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/PEP.2007.0002","url":null,"abstract":"An increasingly prominent approach to school reform emphasizes the possible benefits of creating smaller schools. Proponents argue that small schools are more effective than large schools at promoting student achievement, in large part because they have positive effects on the engagement and social interactions of students and staff. The analysis presented here explores another potentially distinct effect of small schools: the enhanced involvement of students’ parents in the school and the promotion of social capital in the larger community. We present new empirical evidence on whether the size of public high schools influences measures of parental involvement and social capital. This analysis is based on nationally representative data from the base year of the recent Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS:2002). In addition to conducting standard multivariate analyses, we attempt to establish bounds on the causal effects of school size by using the differences in observed traits across parents connected to smaller and larger schools as a guide to the size and direction of their potentially confounding unobserved traits. The results presented here provide tentative evidence that small schools are more effective in promoting parental involvement in schools as well as engagement in the broader community. We find that in rural communities smaller high schools not only increase the probability that parents take part in parent-teacher association activities and volunteer at the school but also promote some measures of social capital (for example, knowledge of other parents and community identification). However, we find no such evidence in suburban communities. Unfortunately, there are so few small schools in the urban communities in our data that we cannot say much about the influence of school size in these contexts. Taken as a whole, our results suggest that there may be some beneficial effects of small schools on the outcomes we consider, but there may also be cultural or economic features unique to rural communities that limit the external validity of these results for other areas.","PeriodicalId":9272,"journal":{"name":"Brookings Papers on Education Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90512692","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Class Size and School Size: Taking the Trade-Offs Seriously","authors":"Douglas N. Harris","doi":"10.1353/PEP.2007.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/PEP.2007.0003","url":null,"abstract":"Small classes and small schools appear to have educational benefits for students. In small classes, children experience fewer disrup tions and receive more personal attention and individualized instruction. Likewise, in small schools, students appear to feel safer and less likely to get \"lost in the crowd\" and teachers are able to provide a more coherent curricu lum. There is a large research literature, including many of the papers in this volume, suggesting that these qualities of the learning environment translate","PeriodicalId":9272,"journal":{"name":"Brookings Papers on Education Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76302400","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Relative Influence of Research on Class Size Policy","authors":"J. Kim","doi":"10.1353/PEP.2007.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/PEP.2007.0004","url":null,"abstract":"Social science research suggests that reducing class size has its largest effects on the achievement of minority and inner-city children during the first year of formal schooling.' Despite scholarly disagreements about the implications of specific studies on class size, economists generally agree that targeted class-size policies rest on stronger evidence than untargeted policies. For example, economist Eric Hanushek contends that \"surely class-size reductions are beneficial in specific circumstances—for specific groups of students, subject matters, and teachers.\"^ Similarly, economist Alan Krueger notes that the \"effect sizes found in the STAR experiment and much of the literature are greater for minority and disadvantaged students than for other students [and] economic considerations suggest that resources would be optimally allocated if they were targeted toward those who benefit the most from smaller classes.\"^ However, a number of state legislatures have enacted untargeted and expensive policies to reduce class sizes in all schools, among all subgroups of students, and beyond the early elementary grades. Therefore, the central tension between research and policy in the class-size debate is this: research seems to support targeted class-size policies most strongly, but targeted policies are the exception rather than the norm in the policy arena. As a result, some social scientists have criticized across-the-board class-size reductions as prohibitively expensive and scientifically indefensible.'*","PeriodicalId":9272,"journal":{"name":"Brookings Papers on Education Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91378608","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Is Small Really Better? Testing Some Assumptions about High School Size","authors":"B. Schneider, Adam E. Wyse, V. Keesler","doi":"10.1353/PEP.2007.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/PEP.2007.0008","url":null,"abstract":"Several years ago, I was in a meeting with a group of Chicago pub lic school coaches and physical education teachers who were discussing the negative implications of one of Chicago's recent reform initia tives, the construction of smaller high schools. Much like other urban areas, Chicago had begun dismantling some of its large high schools to form smaller entities, with an \"optimal\" enrollment of 600 students. The coaches were deeply concerned that the small school movement was fostering the elimina tion of school-sponsored athletic teams, which sometimes acted as a magnet for marginal students, encouraging them to complete high school and in some instances enroll in college. From their perspective, intramural teams were unable to fill the void left by school-sponsored teams, which had helped some students obtain postsecondary scholarships and promoted a high school iden tity that instilled pride in the student body. Reflecting on their comments, I was struck by how my work and that of oth ers had championed small schools. Could we have been wrong? Small schools were generally viewed as places that fostered a strong sense of community and encouraged academic achievement and attainment. But many of us had not explored whether small schools were better for all types of students. More specifically, would the consequences of creating small-school environments prove to be detrimental, especially for low-income minority students enrolled in urban high schools?","PeriodicalId":9272,"journal":{"name":"Brookings Papers on Education Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80955881","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Optimal Context Size in Elementary Schools: Disentangling the Effects of Class Size and School Size","authors":"Douglas D. Ready, V. Lee","doi":"10.1353/PEP.2007.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/PEP.2007.0006","url":null,"abstract":"Young children's learning?and how their learning is distributed by social background?may be influenced by the truc ural an organizational properties of their school. This study focuses on one important structural dimension of these educational contexts: size. Over the past several decades, various elements of the size of educational contexts have become a major focus of researchers, politicians, and corporate leaders. Billions of pub lic and private dollars have been invested in reforms to reduce the size and scope of both classrooms and schools. Unlike many educational reform initia tives, these downsizing efforts have found support from virtually every quarter. A united front of stakeholders has coalesced behind the notion that \"smaller is better.\" Although size-reduction policies are well intentioned, their effective ness is unclear, and some efforts have produced unintended and even undesirable consequences. Moreover, their cost-effectiveness has seldom been considered. Based on results from the famous Tennessee class-size experiment, Cali fornia invested billions of dollars encouraging its schools to limit classes in the early grades to no more than twenty students. Quite recently, the push to reduce the size of high schools has been accompanied by enormous financial support from foundations and the federal government in an effort to encourage schools within-schools, small learning communities, and small stand-alone schools. Curiously, these important policy initiatives?reduced class size and reduced","PeriodicalId":9272,"journal":{"name":"Brookings Papers on Education Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87049563","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"International Evidence on Expenditure and Class Size: A Review","authors":"Ludger Woessmann","doi":"10.1353/PEP.2007.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/PEP.2007.0010","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":9272,"journal":{"name":"Brookings Papers on Education Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74735159","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}