Achievement In Public Schools Research Articles

Precarious Space: Majority Black Suburbs and Their Public Schools

The fact that a third of all African Americans now live in suburbs might suggest how far we have come since the pre-Hrown days. But most African Americans live in predominantly Black suburbs, where property values are lower than in neighboring White suburbs, and where the public schools are funded by a lower tax base. After presenting a national picture, the authors draw on the experiences of Plainfield, New Jersey, and Prince George's County, Maryland, to describe how strained resources, a history of racialized conflicts resulting in troubled governance, and a perception of students as “inner city” all contribute to low student achievement in public schools in predominantly Black suburbs.

Public and Private School Competition: The Spatial Education Production Function

School vouchers may increase the competition public school districts face. Greater competition may spur public schools to improve student outcomes, which reliably predict labor market productivity and earnings. Previous school competition studies do not use spatial statistics; they fail to incorporate spillovers and the effect of omitted variables into their education production functions. Significant spatial effects are found in all regressions, and spatial statistics improves adjusted R-squared. There seems to be no consistent association between private school attendance rates and public school achievement, or between the number of public school districts in a county and public school performance. Competitive effects, which seem plausible in non-spatial regressions, dissipate when spatial statistics is used. When school inputs appeared statistically significant in non-spatial regressions, the spatial regressions generally made the significance disappear. Poverty appeared to depress reading and writing passage rates, but this effect disappeared in the spatial models.

A New Look at Public and Private Schools: Student Background and Mathematics Achievement

The claim that schools do a better job of educating their students than public schools -- an argument central to the push for market-style reforms -- is rarely questioned. But do the data back it up? The authors examined fourth- and eighth-grade NAEP mathematics achievement in over 1,000 public and schools to arrive at a surprising answer. A RECENT report of mathematics results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) highlighted this major Public- school students scored lower on average than non-public-school students at both grades 4 and 8.1 Of course, this finding is nothing new. Indeed, it is part of the common wisdom in the United States that school students outscore public school students on standardized tests. Furthermore, studies have suggested that this is true even when researchers account for the fact that the enrollment at public schools differs from the enrollment at schools. This belief is based, in part, on past studies involving the 1980 High School and Beyond dataset that found that schools are more effective than public schools at boosting student achievement, including that of disadvantaged students.2 These studies of test performance, which controlled for some potentially confounding variables such as socioeconomic status (SES), affirmed widespread assumptions about the superiority of schools. These assumptions, in turn, have influenced recent reform efforts promoting various forms of privatization of public schools, including the No Child Left Behind Act, which makes use of a variety of sector sanctions for failing public schools. However, the seminal studies on school effects are becoming dated, with most based on a sample of students who began school over a generation ago. In addition, most of these studies were limited to high school.3 Some used rough measures of SES that may not have been sufficiently sensitive to the differences in populations served by public and schools. Given the current interest in choice and privatization, it is an important time to examine current evidence relating to achievement in public and schools. While undertaking a broader study of mathematics instruction and equity, we became intrigued by an unexpected finding: when controlling for school status and student background variables in our statistical models, we saw that mathematics achievement in public schools actually appeared higher than that in schools.4 We decided to do a special substudy focusing specifically on achievement differences between public and schools. Using a powerful SES variable created for the broader study, we were able to more carefully examine the question of whether the widely assumed private school effect is due more to the population of students served than to institutional effectiveness. The study focused solely on student achievement in mathematics -- a subject generally thought to be less influenced by family background and more influenced by institutional effects than other school subjects such as literacy. The Role of Family Background NAEP has been an important tool for monitoring trends in U.S. student achievement. It is the only nationally representative, ongoing assessment of U.S. academic achievement, measuring student performance at fourth, eighth, and 12th grades in mathematics and other subject areas. Our study used fourth- and eighth-grade data; eliminating 12th- grade data removed the issue of high school dropouts, which could bias our samples. Furthermore, the focus on students in the earlier grades reduces the likelihood that the students in the sample had transferred between public and schools. We analyzed achievement and survey data from the 2000 Main NAEP mathematics assessment,5 which we obtained from a restricted-use CD-ROM. (When the study was conducted in 2004, the 2000 assessment was the most recent for which raw data were available to researchers. …

Private Schools and Public School Achievement

The effects of private schools on public elementary and secondary school achievement in Illinois are estimated. The percentage of students in private schools in a school district is treated as an endogenous variable in the achievement equation. Catholic religion is used to identify a two-stage model. It is shown that private schools have no direct effect on public school achievement.

Space, Place and the Problematic of Race: Black Adolescent Discourse as Mediated Action

This article examines Black adolescence and schooling within the conceptual framework of mediated action theory. It analyzes the discourses of six Black high school students that connect the concepts of space, relating to the physical body, and place, defining the arrangement of public institutions, to relations of domination and subjugation, or the political construction of race. The article highlights the resources that mediate Black adolescent development, placing emphasis on those that underlie Black adolescent resistance to supremacy. The article concludes by exploring implications for developing pedagogy that is considerate of youth members of subjugated cultures in United States society. INTRODUCTION Scholarly and popular conventions view race affirmation among Black adolescents and their academic achievement in public schools as conflicting, if not mutually exclusive, phenomena. On the one hand, the literature in the social and behavioral sciences is abundant with studies that link academic achievement among Black students to acting White (Fordham, 1988; Ogbu, 1992). On the hand, the general public attitude in the United States in recent years has ranged from denial of to hostility toward the issue of race, especially as it relates to schooling. Nowhere is this more blatant than in California, the flashpoint of anti-immigrant and anti-affirmative action legislation. In that state, social and political dynamics that condemn working and unemployed low-income families to schools with inadequate services and that privilege middle- and high-income families with disproportionately greater resources underlie schooling inequalities. Furthermore, the consistent refusal of predominantly electorates to pass tax levies and bond issues to support schools within their cities where youth whom Delpit (1995) has dubbed other people's children attend maintains these unequal power relations. The parallels between public opinion and scholarship on race and schooling are not merely coincidental. Both scientific and literary scholarship contribute widely to the construction of public and private reality, and the relationship is neither one-way nor mechanical. Rather, it is an extremely complex one in which legitimate knowledge is held as such partly because it tends to resonate with the deeply held beliefs, attitudes, and assumptions of the wider, dominant culture about the character and nature of United States society. These beliefs, attitudes, and assumptions shape and constrain-and indeed, are shaped and constrained by-considerations of what it means to be human and what it is to know something-the same considerations that inform research and scholarship. This article is an effort to press these constraints by approaching race and schooling from the perspectives of Black adolescents who elude conflicts in school that lead to their rejection of or from schools and who eschew racelessness as a strategy for academic achievement. Specifically, it examines the views of Black high school students who connect the concepts of space, relating to the physical body, and place, defining the arrangement of public institutions, to relations of domination and subjugation, or the political construction of race. In words, this article describes and analyzes the capacity of Black adolescents to name and resist racism, both as a conceptual force that circumscribes how they perceive reality and as a material force that constrains their conduct in the social and physical world. The larger project from which the data in this study derive began as an attempt to develop theory to account for the presence of race-affirming, academically achieving Black adolescents that I had met and befriended over a 12-year period both as a public school teacher and as a teacher educator in southern California. These experiences indicated to me that there were gaps in the literature on African American youth that portrayed successful students as downplaying the significance of race and students for whom race is salient as underachievers. …

Reexamination of Input and Process Factor Effects on Public School Achievement

Abstract This study examined the direct effects on, and contribution of, several input and process factors on public school achievement in Louisiana. Socioeconomic status and minority status were the strongest predictors of school achievement in every model. The discrepancy between the achievement of White students and Black students increased with grade level of school. School size did not have any meaningful effect on school achievement, nor was the effect of class size significant for every subpopulation. However, student attendance had a more substantial (p < .001) effect in every model on school achievement. Input factors accounted for as much as 68% of the variance of achievement, whereas process factors contributed no more than an additional 6 1/2% To of explained variance.

Private school versus public school achievement: Are there findings that should affect the educational choice debate?

The purpose of this paper is to determine whether existing research allows us to answer a crucial question: are student achievement differences between public and private schools large enough and certain enough to be of relevance to policymakers considering choice proposals. To do this, I analyze research based on the High School and Beyond study. The argument of this paper is that there is little substantive evidence in this research that has policy relevance for educational choice. Specifically I argue that any differences in achievement between public and private schools that are statistically significant after properly modeling achievement gains are trivial in size and highly uncertain. I conclude by questioning whether High School and Beyond, or research similarly structured, will ever answer the question of whether public or private schools produce greater student achievement.

Student achievement in public schools: Do principals make a difference?

The authors of this paper find that principal behavior and attributes significantly influence individual student achievement. Effective principal activities include instructional leadership (setting clear priorities and evaluating instructional programs, and organizing and participating in staff development programs) and conflict resolution (establishing a consensus on objectives and methods, maintaining effective discipline, and mediating personal disputes). These results, based upon data from a nationally representative sample of over 14,000 elementary school students, provide strong confirmation of the major conclusions from recent case studies, which arc characterized by very limited samples and weak controls for individual student and teacher attributes. In addition, the finding that principals make a difference to student achievement adds further evidence to the debate over whether schools make a difference.

A Study of the Relative Effectiveness of Two Types of Standard Arithmetic Practice Materials

The purpose of this study is to accurately determine which of two types of drill material is most effective in developing skill in arithmetic computation as measured by the Public School Achievement Tests. As one of material included problems in arithmetic reasoning with those in arithmetic computation, it was decided that a measurement of the growth of arithmetic reasoning ability would indicate the value, if any, of problems of this type. For several years a of drill or practice material in arithmetic computation, referred to in this study as type material, has been used successfully in the Ithaca public schools. second of practice material designated as type in this study, has been represented as possessing certain advantages that result in greater pupil achievement. These advantages are principally of form, visibility, arrangement, print ing, and content. As the B material includes provision for formal practice in arithmetic reasoning, as indicated above, the scores in this field are included to indicate its effect. The practice materials, both A and B, together with the tests used to measure achievement in this study may be briefly described as follows :