Educational Policy Outcomes Research Articles

Local charter school service delivery: The explanatory power of interest groups

The primary goal of this study is to examine whether educational interest groups’ roles explain local charter school service delivery in Colorado. Many scholars have found that interest groups affect educational policy outcomes and performance at national, state, and local levels. However, it is not clear whether interest groups’ roles are still important in local charter school service delivery. This article seeks to address this lack of knowledge by analyzing the variation of charter school service delivery in Colorado school districts. The present study tests seven hypotheses, using multiple ordinary least square (OLS) regression analysis. The final statistical results demonstrate that a school district with more pro-school choice movement interest groups, minority students, and residents who earn a bachelor's degree or above is more likely to deliver charter school services to its residents.

Improving Educational Outcomes for Latinos: A Study of the Interactive Policy Effects of Representative Bureaucracy and Personnel Stability

This article seeks to determine whether 2 common management strategies, representative bureaucracy and personnel stability, can be used in combination with each other in order to improve educational policy outcomes for Latinos. Using data from Texas school districts from 1994 to 2010 and a cross-sectional longitudinal research design, I find that although each theory on its own improved outcomes for Latinos, the 2 did not have a significant combined effect. Instead I find evidence of a substitution effect that allows 1 strategy to be used in place of the other in order to improve the academic performance of Latinos.

English

The enhancement of the academic achievement of the Nigerian students has continued to engage the attention of educational practitioners and policy makers.  This paper investigated institutional factors as predictors of students’ academic performance in Colleges of Education in South-Western Nigeria.  The study employed the ex post facto design using a survey design and a multiple regression model.  The samples used for the study consisted of 1,100 (200 and 300 levels) National Certificate of Education (NCE) students in Federal, State and Private NCE-awarding institutions in South Western Nigeria, using stratified sampling techniques.  The validated research instruments used for the study had the following psychometric properties: Cronbach alpha (α) [0.79 (students) and 0.73 (lecturers); Guttman split-half 0.78 (students) and 0.71 (lecturers; and Spearman-Brown equal length results were 0.69 (students) and 0.70 lecturers)]. The study found that a number of institutional factors: student-teacher-ratio, lecturers’ interest and commitment, school calendar stability and to a lesser extent, teaching method, were significant predictors of students’ academic achievement in the colleges of education sampled.  On the other hand, school leadership, school plant and library facilities were not found to be significant predictors of academic achievement.  The study proffered a number of recommendations to improve the quality of educational policy outcomes geared towards improving students' educational performance and hence enhance the achievement of national economics goals. Key words: Institutional factors, academic achievement, Nigeria, ex post facto design, stratified random sampling, multiple regression.

English

Educational stakeholders have continued to express concerns over the poor academic performance of Nigerian students at virtually all levels of academic engagements. This paper investigated personal factors as predictors of students’ academic performance in the South-Western Nigeria. The study employed the ex post facto design using a survey design and a multiple regression model. The samples used for the study consisted of 1,100 (200 and 300) National Certificate of Education (NCE) students in Federal, State and Private NCE-awarding institutions in South Western Nigeria, using stratified sampling techniques. The validated research instruments used for the study had the following psychometric properties: Cronbach alpha (α) [0.79 (students) and 0.73 (lecturers); Guttman split-half 0.78 (students) and 0.71 (lecturers; and Spearman-Brown equal length results were 0.69 (students) and 0.70 (lecturers)]. The study found that a number of personal factors like students’ interests, home environment, parental support and study habits were significant predictors of students’ academic achievement in the Colleges of Education sampled. On the other hand, students’ perception of course and self-concept were not found to be significant predictors of academic achievement. The study proffered a number of recommendations to improve the quality of educational policy outcomes geared towards improving students' educational performance and hence enhance the achievement of national economic goals. Key words: Personal factors, academic achievement, Nigeria, expost facto design, stratified random sampling, multiple regressions.

Towards understanding ambivalence in educational policy outcomes in Kenya

Five decades after independence, the majority of Kenyan children do not receive quality education and live with limited economic and social opportunities. To this end, why have educational policies not worked as intended? I use Chabal and Daloz's (1999) framework to argue that good policies have not produced intended outcomes; instead, their implementations have delimited educational, social, and economic opportunities. Lackluster policy outcomes have perpetuated concentration of power and wealth, fostered weak public institutions, and destabilized citizenry while normalizing chaos.

Latino Immigration and Representation in Local Politics

Theories of racial politics argue that areas with large minority population are characterized by greater levels of policy equity, yet empirical research often fails to find evidence for this prediction. In this article, we develop and test an alternative view of the relationship between minority group size and the representation of minority interests in government using the case of Latino representation in local politics. We argue that Latino group size results in both favorable and unfavorable policy outcomes for Latino communities. The nature of the Latino population, specifically the extent to which it is composed primarily of citizens or noncitizens, explains when each outcome will occur. Latinos achieve more favorable policy outcomes for their interests when the size of the Latino citizen population increases but less favorable outcomes when the number of Latino noncitizens increases. The negative effect of noncitizen group size is mediated by the presence of Latino citizens and representatives. Our hypotheses are tested using data from a national sample of several hundred local school districts and educational policy outcomes.

The Transformation in Gender Inequality in Tertiary Education

ABSTRACTBetween 1960 and 1981 there was a very substantial increase in female enrolment and a move towards a much lessened degree of gender inequality in tertiary education in most advanced industrial societies. The article seeks to locate the main determinants of cross-national variance in gender inequality at both time points and of change across time. The hypotheses examined suggest the influence of a variety of economic, social structural, political, demographic and attitudinal variables and a multivariate analysis demonstrates that all are implicated in the transformation of educational policy outcomes during the period.

Socioeconomic Environment, Political System, and Educational Policy Outcomes: A Comparative Analysis of 102 Countries

While the structure and functioning of national political systems has always been a central concern of political scientists interested in comparative politics, the content of public policy is also a dependent variable which political scientists must endeavor to explain. Policy outcomes express the value commitments of political systems and these commitments are important political data. The task of comparative politics is to identify and assess the forces that shape and explain variations in public policy, and this includes educational policy. Mounting concern over the achievements of public education in the developed countries has drawn attention to the relationship between politics and educational policies in these countries.1 The growing recognition of the role of education in the developing countries of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East in providing the requisite skills, aspirations, resources, and values essential to the development of modern societies has been documented in many recent studies.2 All of this tends to greatly accentuate the need for examining policy outcomes in public education in the developed and developing countries. To date very little research has been reported which attempts to bring some of the conceptual models and statistical tools of political science to a comparative study of the independent variables that relate to educational policy outcomes in a large number of countries of the world.3 The purpose of the research reported below was to explore some of the determinants of educational policy outcomes in 102 national political systems for the 1964-65 period. Specifically, we wished to assess the impact of political system variables on educational outcomes, and to compare the effect of these political variables on educational outcomes with the effect of socioeconomic