Low-quality Schools Research Articles

Confronting Medical Diploma Mills: State Licensing Boards, Legislatures, and the Limits of Medical Authority in the 1920s.

In the standard story of the rise of professional authority in medicine in the 1920s, state medical licensing boards were partners in a coalition, led by the American Medical Association, to radically improve medical education. Boards obtained state laws that limited admission to licensing examinations to graduates of schools approved by the AMA, thus bringing about the rapid demise of low-quality schools by about 1925. The reality at the state level was quite different, however. Medical examining boards containing homeopaths, eclectics, and sometimes osteopaths could be far from reliable partners. Passing laws to benefit the medical profession was exceedingly difficult and dependent on local medical politics. Through the lens of a major medical diploma mill scandal revealed by a journalist in 1923, this paper examines reform efforts in three states greatly affected by the scandal: Missouri, where the scandal originated, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. In each of these states, graduates of low-quality schools as well as fake doctors from diploma mills were able to take a state examination and practice. This paper argues that the AMA, far from being the major player in the elimination of inadequate schools, could set standards but had to stay on the sidelines.

High-quality teachers in low-quality schools: understanding the variation in teaching quality in low-achieving Chilean schools

ABSTRACT The aim of this study is to understand the strengths and weaknesses of schools and provide inputs to better inform both research and public policies. To address this aim, 258 low-achieving Chilean primary schools and their 1,266 teachers were analysed. On the basis of a multilevel latent class analysis, we found four profiles of teaching practices. The proportion of teachers in the high-quality teacher category is unexpectedly high (38.37%), followed by the low-quality (25.61%), content-oriented (18.91%), and climate-oriented (17.12%) categories. Finally, several school-level variables were tested to explore the link between school practices and teaching quality categories. The results show that the quality of the school’s teaching practices related to their support for behavioural issues is associated with the probability of teachers belonging to the low-quality or climate-oriented categories. These findings can be valuable for policymaking, as they call for the development of strategies that strengthen teachers’ capacities within schools.

The Academic Success Among the Students of Low-Income Families.

Students’ academic success is often impacted by various factors such as family background, socio-economic status, and access to educational resources. However, students from low-income families face unique challenges that hinder their academic achievement. The purpose of this study is to comprehensively analyze these challenges and identify potential strategies to support the academic success of these students. The study began by examining the impact of poverty on the educational outcomes of students. It will evaluate how economic hardships, limited access to resources like textbooks and technology, and unstable living conditions may impact their academic performance. A qualitative research design was used in the study to understand how the expected result of academic success among students from low-income families can vary based on individual circumstances. However, research and studies will show that there are potential challenges that students from low-income families may face that can impact their academic success. These challenges may include limited access to educational resources, such as textbooks or technology, lower-quality schools, inadequate nutrition, less parental involvement, and increased exposure to stressful home environments. This research intends to investigate the above issues and to provide recommendations for Policymakers to focus on increasing the availability and affordability of educational resources, such as providing free textbooks or laptops to low-income students. Additionally, interventions that target the socio-emotional well-being of students, such as counseling services or mentorship programs, should be implemented.

Виклики сучасного розвитку людського капіталу сільських територій України в умовах економічних трансформацій

The article is concerned with systematization of factors that hinder the development of human capital in rural areas of Ukraine and are components of the mechanism of its destruction. The factors of destruction of human capital in rural areas are: low-quality school education; poor medical care; unsatisfactory level of development of social infrastructure; monopsony of agricultural enterprises in the rural labor market; low level of development of non-agricultural species; urbanization and the growth of rural unemployment. These factors cause such challenges as low labor productivity, high potential for unemployment and marginalization, excess of mortality over birth rate, migration, low incomes and depopulation of rural areas, which, in turn, lead to the destruction of human capital in rural areas. The development of human capital in rural areas of Ukraine largely depends on social infrastructure. The revival of the village is impossible without the priority development of its social sphere, which requires comprehensive institutional and material measures. Improving the quality of educational and medical services, as well as the development of socio-cultural facilities are critically important for stable economic development and improving the well-being of the population in rural areas. The problems of implementing the strategic task of reproduction and development of human capital in rural areas are caused by the low level of innovation and technological modernization in the agrarian sector, which negatively affects labor productivity. The existing link between the development of human capital and the socioeconomic progress of rural areas emphasizes the need to create conditions for the reproduction of human capital through the development of entrepreneurship, improving the quality of labor potential and social infrastructure. Effective human capital development in rural areas requires overcoming these challenges through an integrated approach that includes innovative solutions, investment in social and productive infrastructure, and increased entrepreneurship.

The development of a behavioural competency framework for school principals

Orientation: More than two and a half decades into South Africa’s democracy, the majority of the country’s learners receive low-quality school education, adversely affecting upward social mobility. Ensuring quality education for all South Africans requires a combined approach of equitable resource allocation and effective school leadership that transforms resources into educational outcomes.Research purpose: The objective of the study was to develop a behavioural competency framework for school principals.Motivation for the study: While past studies highlight school leadership and management to be pivotal in the establishment and maintenance of well-performing schools, less is known about the behavioural competencies required by school principals.Research approach and method: Guided by a synthesis of literature on school management, critical incident interviews were conducted with a sample of 10 school principals with good track records. The salience of the literature-derived competencies was established, and the content supplemented by contextualising the competencies with specific behavioural denotations from the interviews.Main findings: Eleven key competencies emerged from the data: creating a school vision and setting strategic direction, setting goals and expectations, developing school staff, influencing and communicating, resourcing strategically, leading with compassion, maintaining a student-centred learning environment, making decisions, managing self, managing teaching and learning, and leading across school boundaries.Managerial implications: The competencies identified provide a blueprint to guide human resource management interventions aimed at establishing effective school leadership.Contribution: The study provides a rich source of information about critical school principal behaviours, explored from an integrated perspective that acknowledges the school context.

Improving the Quality Education Through Madrasah Committees

Madrasah could not erase the negative impression of "low quality schools" attached so far. The education quality improvement program has many problems at the application level, including the case of Muhammadiyah schools. One thing that supports or affects the quality of education is the madrasah committee. Therefore, this study aimed to determine the role of madrasah committees in improving the quality of education at the planning, implementation, and evaluation stages. This research can be categorized as qualitative research with a case study method. Qualitative descriptive data analysis techniques became the choice in this study. Based on the research, in general, the role of the madrasah committee is good. The committee runs according to what is expected. The madrasah committee carries out planning, implementation, and evaluation as a form of participation in advancing the quality of education in the madrasah.

Principals’ perspectives on the shift to short-cycle school improvement planning

Principals are responsible for planning school improvement efforts at the school level to leverage increases in student achievement. Recent research underscores how principals engage in satisficing behaviors that result in low-quality school improvement plans (SIPs). To disrupt compliance-based planning practices and produce high-quality SIPs, some districts have shifted from yearlong planning to short-cycle planning. Districts need to establish a coherent understanding of improvement planning to motivate and sustain new principal planning practices. Through the coherence framework, this qualitative study explored one large urban district's shift from yearlong planning processes to short-cycle planning processes to understand principals’ perspectives on improvement planning and the potential shift to short-cycle planning. Researchers examined eight principals’ short-cycle plans. Principals who participated in a two-year partnership with a University System Leadership Program (USLP) for school-level support for school improvement were interviewed. Principal interviews, USLP site lead feedback, and principal supervisors’ interview data to triangulate the short-cycle plans. Data analysis revealed the existence of a perverse coherence that impeded principals’ shift to short-cycle planning. Findings suggest that districts examine their internal practices and processes influencing principals’ improvement planning practices and attend to principals’ understanding and practice of improvement planning by providing continuous professional learning and feedback.

Growing up with systemic racism in the USA

Growing up with systemic racism in the USA

Separate and unequal: hukou, school segregation, and educational inequality in urban China

Competition for educational resources between local citizens and new arrivals in receiving cities can lead to severe school segregation, thereby generating great educational inequality. In this paper, we focus on a special form of segregation in urban China that is based on the holding of a local hukou, which is a crucial criterion for school enrollment. Using data from a nationally representative school-based student panel survey, we find that migrants are disproportionally sorted into low-quality schools, which contributes to a sizeable achievement gap between migrants and locals. We further adopt school and individual fixed effect models to disentangle the influence of peer exposure from that of school quality and find no adverse impact of migrant concentration per se on student outcomes.

Penggerombolan Sekolah pada Penerimaan Mahasiswa Baru Jalur SNMPTN di IPB Menggunakan Metode Two-Step Cluster

New student admissions are opened in three pathways including SNMPTN, SBMPTN, and Seleksi Mandiri. In order to improve the SNMPTN selection system at IPB, a study was conducted on the quality of SMA/MA which registered to IPB through school clustering. In general, cluster analysis cannot handle large and mixed-type data, so this school clustering used the Two-Step Cluster method with two alternatives, namely without handling outliers and handling 5 percent outliers. Both of these alternatives produced an average Silhouette coefficient value of 0.2 and 0.3 respectively, which was still under the good category. However, clustering without handling outliers resulted in more detailed cluster criteria with 4 optimal clusters. The criteria for these four clusters include, Cluster 1 is a category of Low Commitment, Low Quality, and Low Consistency schools, Cluster 2 and 3 are categories of schools that have special criteria in certain categories, and Cluster 4 is a category of High Commitment, High Quality, and High Consistency.

Charter schools and equity: The power of accountability

Many proponents of charter schools suggest that, by providing an option outside traditional public schools, they are helping disadvantaged students who might otherwise be confined to low-quality neighborhood schools. But market-based accountability structures are insufficient to ensure that charter schools are actually enrolling students (i.e., students from economically distressed families, students with disabilities, English learners, and students of color) and, once they are enrolled, providing them sufficient support. Helen Ladd and Edward Fiske use the Massachusetts system of authorization, data collection, and site visits to illustrate a high quality public accountability system for charter schools that is focused on promoting equity.

Last and furious: Relative position and school violence

This paper examines the effect of a high school student's relative position in the class achievement distribution on school violence. We identify this effect by exploiting idiosyncratic differences in the distribution of earlier academic achievement across classes. Such differences generate quasi-random variation in rank for students with the same initial achievement. We consider distinct types of school violence, namely, verbal, relational and physical violence. We find that rank negatively affects both the probability and frequency of perpetrating school violence for all the specific types of violence considered. The effect size is economically significant, especially in the case of physical violence. We find that rank is less or not effective in reducing physical violence for migrants and for students attending lower-quality schools and living in high-crime areas; this finding is consistent with the lower perceived opportunity cost associated with misbehavior among disadvantaged students in low-quality schools and located in violent local contexts.

Reopening Schools in the Pandemic Did Not Increase COVID-19 Incidence and Mortality in Brazil

Background: School closures due to COVID-19 have left 1.6 billion students around the world without in-person classes for a prolonged period of time. To date, no study has documented whether reopening schools in developing countries during the pandemic causally increased aggregate COVID-19 incidence and mortality with appropriate counterfactuals.Methods: We take advantage of the fact that 131 municipalities in São Paulo State, Brazil, reopened schools for in-person activities between October and December 2020, to estimate the causal effects of school reopening on municipal-level COVID-19 effective potential growth and deaths. We estimate treatment effects through a differences-in-differences strategy, comparing how outcomes evolved between municipalities that reopened schools and all others, before and after school reopening. We also estimate heterogeneous treatment effects by local characteristics. Last, we estimate the effects of school reopening on a local mobility index to shed light on the mechanisms behind its impacts on disease activity.Findings: We find that school reopening did not increase COVID-19 incidence or mortality on average, up to 12 weeks after reopening. The counterfactual is critical for our conclusions: comparing only municipalities that reopened schools before and after reopening would lead us to conclude the opposite. Reopening schools did not affect disease activity even in poorer municipalities, in those with low-quality school infrastructure, with higher senior population share, or with higher baseline disease activity. We also find no effects of school reopening on the local mobility index.Interpretation: While keeping schools open during the pandemic could still increase risks for school staff and students’ families, our findings suggest that it did not contribute to the aggregate disease activity. This was the case not only because schools typically represent only a small fraction of the overall municipal population, but also because counterfactual mobility during the pandemic was already substantial even in the absence of in-person classes – making the marginal health benefits of keeping schools closed negligible in the aggregate.

Reopening Schools in the Pandemic Did Not Increase COVID-19 Incidence and Mortality in Brazil

Background: School closures due to Covid-19 have left 1.6 billion students around the world without in-person classes for a prolonged period of time.To date, no study has documented whether reopening schools in developing countries during the pandemic causally increased aggregate Covid-19 incidence and mortality with appropriate counterfactuals. Methods: We take advantage of the fact that 131 municipalities in São Paulo State, Brazil, reopened schools for in-person activities between October and December 2020, to estimate the causal effects of school reopening on municipal-level Covid-19 effective potential growth and deaths. We estimate treatment effects through a differences-in-differences strategy, comparing how outcomes evolved between municipalities that reopened schools and all others, before and after school reopening. We also estimate heterogeneous treatment effects by local characteristics. Last, we estimate the effects of school reopening on a local mobility index to shed light on the mechanisms behind its impacts on disease activity.\ Findings: We find that school reopening did not increase Covid-19 incidence or mortality on average, up to 12 weeks after reopening. The counterfactual is critical for our conclusions: comparing only municipalities that reopened schools before and after reopening would lead us to conclude the opposite. Reopening schools did not affect disease activity even in poorer municipalities, in those with low-quality school infrastructure, with higher senior population share, or with higher baseline disease activity. We also find no effects of school reopening on the local mobility index. Interpretation: While keeping schools open during the pandemic could still increase risks for school staff and students’ families, our findings suggest that it did not contribute to the aggregate disease activity. This was the case not only because schools typically represent only a small fraction of the overall municipal population, but also because counterfactual mobility during the pandemic was already substantial even in the absence of in-person classes – making the marginal health benefits of keeping schools closed negligible in the aggregate. Funding: Research funded by the Inter-American Development Bank. Declaration of Interest: GL and OLN received fees from the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) for the design of this study. JC is an IADB staff member. CAB declares no competing interests.

Exiting Detroit for school: inequitable choice sets and school quality

ABSTRACT Research has documented the complexity of parent decision-making within school choice marketplaces, including the ways in which individual preferences, social networks, and geography influence where parents choose to enroll their children in school. Yet, parent choices are constrained by the ways in which these dynamics intersect with existing school characteristics and locations. By constructing unique choice set ‘landscapes’ for 194 Detroit neighborhoods, taking into account where current neighbors attend school in the city, this paper contributes new evidence on the influence of peer enrollment on school choosing, and how peer choice sets differ from students’ nearest schools. We find that parents are responsive to lower quality schools in their choice sets when choosing to exit and that choice set quality varies by race, with Black students having lower quality schools in their Detroit choice sets.

The impact of partial source dependence on belief and reliability revision.

In this article, we explore how people revise their belief in a hypothesis and the reliability of sources in circumstances where those sources are either independent or are partially dependent because of their shared, common background. Specifically, we examine people's revision of perceived source reliability by comparison with a formal model of reliability revision proposed by Bovens and Hartmann (2003). This model predicts a U-shaped trajectory for revision in certain circumstances: If a source provides a positive report for an unlikely hypothesis, perceived source reliability should decrease; as additional positive reports emerge, however, estimates of reliability should increase. Participants' updates in our experiment show this U-shaped pattern. Furthermore, participants' responses also respect a second feature of the model, namely that perceived reliability should once again decrease when it becomes known that the sources are partially dependent. Participants revise appropriately both when a specific shared reliability is observed (e.g., sources went to the same, low quality school) and when integrating the possibility of shared reliability. These findings shed light on how people gauge source reliability and integrate reports when multiple sources weigh in on an issue as seen in public debates. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

School Quality and Peer Effects: Explaining Differences in Academic Performance between China’s Migrant and Rural Students

In China, parents have a choice to either send their children to private migrant schools in urban areas or to keep them in their own county. It is unclear whether the academic differences of students in rural schools and those in private migrant schools is due to the quality of schools, the quality of students/peers, or the ways that peer effects interact with the quality of the school. Using survey data from students with rural residency who attended either migrant schools or rural public schools, we measure how differences in the quality of the types of schools and how the effect of peers differs in high- versus low-quality schools. An instrumental variable approach is used to identify the causality of a student’s peers on his or her academic outcomes and within the context of each of the school venues. The gap in student academic performance is explained by the differences in each student’s peers as and in how peers interact in the schooling environments. The analysis also demonstrates that there is a significant interaction effect between one’s peers and the quality of a student’s school environment. We found that school quality has a complementary effect with peers on student academic performance.

GraphoLearn India: The Effectiveness of a Computer-Assisted Reading Intervention in Supporting Struggling Readers of English.

India, a country with a population of more than 1.3 billion individuals, houses the world’s second largest educational system. Despite this, 100 of millions of individuals in India are still illiterate. As English medium education sweeps the country, many are forced to learn in a language which is foreign to them. Those living in poverty further struggle to learn English as it tends to be a language which they have no prior exposure to and no support at home for. Low-quality schools and poor instructional methods further exacerbate the problem. Without access to quality education, these individuals continue to struggle and are ultimately never given the chance to break the cycle of poverty. The aim of this study was to determine whether GraphoLearn, a computer-assisted reading tool, could be used to support the English reading skills of struggling readers in India. Participants were 7-year-old, grade 3 students (N = 30), who were attending an English-medium public school in Ahmedabad, India. English was not a native language for any of the students and all were reading at a level below that of Grade 1 despite having attended school for 2 years. Half of the students played GraphoLearn (n = 16) while the other half played a control math game (n = 14) for 20–30 min a day, over a period of 8 weeks. GraphoLearn led to significant improvements in children’s letter-sound knowledge, a critical factor in early reading development. Overall, the study opens doors for GraphoLearn as a potential intervention to support struggling readers of English in India, including those who are learning a non-native language and coming from at-risk backgrounds.

Meeting the Challenges of Minorities in Higher Education: A Review of the Underrepresentation of Hispanics in Medical School

Bridging the gap between Hispanics and the medical profession is critical to addressing the diversity disparities and in upholding quality healthcare to individuals of all ethnic backgrounds. The deficiency in Hispanic healthcare providers is attested by the low representation of Hispanics in medical schools across the nation. Despite current research, there is lack of research that would help develop a comprehensive approach to increase Hispanic representation in the medical profession. The objective of this study is to interpret, analyze, and integrate information about the challenges experienced by underrepresented minorities (URM) in their quest to medical school. This research seeks to answer the question: What individual‐level and sociocultural factors impede Hispanic participation and representation in medical school? To answer this question, a library research to review the literature using peer‐reviewed articles was conducted. The articles were read thoroughly, scrutinized, evaluated for their relevance, and interpreted with new understandings. The analysis of key factors contributing to low representation of minorities in higher education was done through synthesis of the pertinent information reported in previous studies. Our review showed that a key factor contributing to low representation of Hispanics in medical school was their low acceptance rate. While seemingly obvious and its proximal correlates equally obvious (i.e., low academic performance metrics such as grade point average (GPA), science GPA, and MCAT scores), the less visible and the more distal reasons relating to educational inequalities such as deficiency in resources, lower quality schools, working student status, and constrained financial means for test preparation courses and materials all conspired to deter and diminish competencies that are critical to maintaining high academic performance metrics. Other seemingly inconspicuous and distal reasons and yet adversely impacting academic performance metrics have to do with inadequate social capital such as lack of access to academic support networks, academic mentors, real‐life role models, and familial support. Combatting these hindrances requires special attention to develop outreach initiatives with primary and secondary schools to attract and better prepare underrepresented minority students. Implementation of summer programs, collaborative enrichment initiatives, and mentoring systems with the aid of medical schools as well as the primary and secondary schools are indeed needed to stimulate growth in Hispanic representation.Support or Funding InformationAct on Ideas Texas A&M International University and College of Arts and Sciences Texas A&M International UniversityThis abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2018 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.

Private tutoring, students’ cognitive ability and school engagement, and the formal schooling context: Evidence from middle school students in China

This study examines the effects of participation in private tutoring on Chinese students’ cognitive ability and school engagement, and further investigates the role of the formal schooling context in moderating these effects. Utilizing a nationally representative data set of Chinese middle school students and the method of propensity score matching, I find that participation in private tutoring significantly boosts students’ cognitive ability and school engagement. Moreover, multilevel models are employed to demonstrate that the observed positive effects of receiving private tutoring vary across schools. Specifically, these effects are more significant for students in low-quality schools and tend to decrease for students in higher-quality schools. This study thus calls for a systematic examination of the private tutoring effects on various dimensions of student development as well as the contextual influence of formal schools while discussing the implications of private tutoring for educational inequality in contemporary China.