Determinants of Organizational Failure in the Milwaukee School Voucher Program

In this article, we utilize 25 years of data on the Milwaukee voucher program to test the relationships among organizational liabilities of newness, institutional affiliation, market‐share, and regulatory environment on the cumulative risk of school failure. Overall, we find that 41 percent of all private voucher schools operating in Milwaukee between 1991 and 2015 failed. Start‐up voucher schools, and those unaffiliated with a larger institution, have comparatively higher failure risk over time. The results of our analysis shed light onto one of the long‐term impacts of a public policy reform premised on social entrepreneurship. We conclude that policymakers should consider the consequences of organizational failure when utilizing nongovernment entities in the provision of public goods, and that scholars focus increased attention to understanding the negative externalities created by public entrepreneurship.     

Learning from Schools: School Choice,Political Learning,and Policy Feedback

This article investigates the policy feedback and political learning effects of school vouchers. Of particular interest is how market‐based policies affect the likelihood that program participants will connect their experiences with the policy to the government. I examine parent survey data from an evaluation of the Milwaukee school voucher program. I find that voucher parents are more likely than public school parents to perceive that the government has influenced their child's schooling and to believe that their experiences with their child's school have taught them about how government works. Further, voucher parents report that their experiences with the policy have made them more politically active. While majorities of voucher and public school parents support increased public school expenditures, there is some evidence that school vouchers may decrease support for public schools.     

School Choice and Educational Stratification

Recent growth in the number of school choice programs across the country has ignited debate on the stratifying effects of these programs. In the context of interdistrict open enrollment, this paper analyzes—both theoretically and empirically—how choice programs affect stratification levels through the mechanisms of (i) the relative characteristics of program participants and nonparticipants and (ii) the schooling choices of different groups of program participants. The theoretical analysis uses Monte Carlo simulation techniques to analyze a hypothetical world where interdistrict choice is available to students in three school districts that are allowed to vary in student composition, the type of students who take advantage of the interdistrict choice program, and schooling choices of students who open enroll. The results of these simulations provide an understanding of the conditions under which an interdistrict open enrollment program leads to increases, decreases, or no changes in stratification levels. The empirical analysis uses data from the universe of students attending Colorado public schools in 2009–10 to examine how the state's interdistrict choice program affects stratification levels. It also analyzes the factors responsible for any increases or decreases in stratification and finds both participation patterns and differences in schooling decisions across groups to play important roles. The paper concludes with a discussion of its implications for research and policy.     

School Choice in Milwaukee

For decades educational reformers have identified school choice programs as a strategy for restructuring public school systems. Practically every state has considered or adopted a school assignment program that qualifies as a "choice" initiative, one in which students and parents have some choice in school selection. Increasingly, school districts are contemplating plans that include a choice of private, as well as public, schools. One of the most far-reaching of these school choice plans is the Milwaukee (Wisconsin) Parental Choice Program, which, as legislated, allows parents to use vouchers to enroll their children in both sectarian and nonsectarian schools in the community. This paper explores the evolution of school choice in Milwaukee and examines the extent to which school choice is representative of other privatization efforts currently under way in the United States.     

Mapping schools' NAPLAN results: a spatial inequality of school outcomes in Australia

This article identifies spatial dimensions of educational outcomes using maps of the 2016 Grade 5 reading results for Australia's National Assessment Program–Literacy and Numeracy for all Australian schools. A geographical information system (GIS) was used to overlay schools' results onto suburbs' advantage or disadvantage to visualise spatial patterns. We then examined the extent to which school results “cluster” in socio‐economically advantaged and disadvantaged suburbs and considered the consistency of spatial patterns for results across major cities. That work illustrates both how GIS can foreground educational inequality and how “the spatial” is more than corollary for student socio‐economic status. Results show substantial differences between urban and remote areas and towns of different size. Maps of cities visualise spatial “clustering” patterns of school results, with most schools in advantaged suburbs having high results and almost no schools in disadvantaged suburbs having high results. Educational outcomes strongly align to local socio‐demographic characteristics, and parallel host communities’ levels of advantage or disadvantage. Differences between public and private schools are less significant than within‐sector differences for schools in advantaged or disadvantaged locales. Patterns in all cities are consistent—schools in advantaged suburbs predominantly have high results, whereas non‐government schools generally perform better than government schools in disadvantaged suburbs. Most concerning is the persistent and increasing trajectory of results in advantaged, and more so in disadvantaged suburbs, of all cities since the first National Assessment Program–Literacy and Numeracy in 2008. Ameliorating spatial inequality between primary schools is one of the greatest challenges for Australians.     

Immigrant Inclusion in the Safety Net: A Framework for Analysis and Effects on Educational Attainment

Across states, there is substantial variation in the degree to which immigrants and their children are offered public assistance. We present a theoretical framework for analyzing the effects of policy decisions about immigrant inclusion. We apply the framework to investigate the effect of the state safety net on educational attainment. We focus on the years following welfare reform in 1996, when states gained considerable autonomy over welfare policy, including decisions about the eligibility of immigrant residents. Leveraging state‐level data from before and after reform, we estimate a difference‐in‐difference model to identify the effect of variation in immigrant inclusivity on educational attainment. We find that when states broaden the inclusivity of the social safety net to immigrants, young Latinos are more likely to graduate from high school. This effect is present beyond the group of Latino residents who receive additional benefits, suggesting that policy decisions about immigrants spill over to broader communities and communicate broader messages about social inclusion to racial and ethnic groups. We find similar patterns among Asian youth, but not among black and non‐Hispanic white youth. We conclude that immigrant inclusion has consequences for the life prospects of the growing population of youth in high‐immigrant ethnic groups.     

What Drives Charter School Diffusion at the Local Level: Educational Needs or Political and Institutional Forces?

While the number of charter schools has increased rapidly in the United States, few studies have examined whether charter schools are implemented in response to real and perceived educational needs or to political and institutional factors in the education policy arena. Unlike traditional policy adoption and diffusion studies that focus on the state level and use a dichotomous dependent variable—adoption or not—this article focuses on local school districts and uses the number of operating charter schools as the dependent variable. Accordingly, instead of applying event history analysis, this article conducts generalized event count regression to estimate models. Based on a data set that consists of Florida's 67 school districts across a six‐year time period, the results suggest that charter school diffusion is more heavily driven by political and institutional factors than by educational needs. The results also demonstrate a dynamic trend of charter school diffusion over time.     

General Social Capital,Education‐Related Social Capital,and Choosing Charter Schools

Proponents of charter schools credit them with many advantages over traditional schools. One claim is that school choice yields increased parental participation in voluntary school activities—which we shall call education‐related social capital. In this article we test for the independent effect of school choice on education‐related social capital, controlling for general social capital and other potentially confounding variables. Studies of school choice invariably show that choosing parents have a greater level of general social capital than non‐choosing parents. Consequently, any increase in education‐related social capital could be spurious—due to the fact that choice parents start with atypically high levels of general social capital. We find under controlled conditions that school choice has a small but statistically significant effect on education‐related social capital. However, its effect is considerably smaller than for general social capital, as well as for other traditional predictors such as parental education and the school‐related home resources that parents may provide.     

PUBLIC AND SUBSIDIZED HOUSING AS A PLATFORM FOR BECOMING A UNITED STATES CITIZEN*

ABSTRACT Each year, hundreds of thousands of people immigrate to the United States seeking a better way of life, and still hundreds of thousands more become citizens. Some spend time living in public and subsidized housing, sponsored by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and, each year, thousands of these individuals attain citizenship. This paper presents an econometric analysis of the propensity of noncitizens living in HUD‐sponsored housing to naturalize. Providing housing and other forms of public assistance to noncitizens is controversial but the fact of the matter is that, under current rules, many qualify for aid so, facing that fact, an important contribution of this research is to identify the type of program that works best in the context of broader national objectives. The key finding is that the market‐based approach of the housing choice voucher program—and the spatial mobility it facilitates—significantly and substantively contribute to naturalization.     

Alternatives to record-linkage in the study of urban migration: The uses of naturalization records

Abstract

In this article, the authors examine the growth of secondary school attainment in the United States between 1940 and 1980, exploring several different conceptual frames of reference. Using state-level data, the authors identify a diffusion model of educational expansion using a fixed-effects panel regression approach. This method is used to analyze change over time, with particular attention to evaluating nonlinear processes of growth. The authors consider the effect of a number of correlates on changing patterns of enrollment in the postwar era. Regional differences in attainment diminished during each decade, and a limited number of social and economic developments appear to have influenced rising enrollment, although most attainment growth appears to have been linked to a self-generating process of diffusion.     

Does Diversity Matter? Measuring the Impact of High School Diversity on Freshman GPA

At the heart of arguments for affirmative action in university admissions are various claims about ethnic diversity. One assertion is that a diverse student body improves the quality of the educational experience: all students learn more. Further, a diverse educational experience better prepares students for the pluralistic society in which they will live. Previous studies examining these issues have been based on informal and survey methods. To better assess the impact of diversity we utilize a data set that allows us to measure student performance at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) as a function of the diversity of a student's high school. Do students from diverse high schools do better in the ethnically diverse environment at UIC? After controlling for other factors that affect GPA, such as ACT, high school rank, and high school quality, we find significant diversity impacts. Depending on the diversity measure, a student from a very diverse high school has an expected first semester GPA that is a one‐fourth to one‐half point higher than a student from a nondiverse high school. The diversity impacts tend to be greater for students in the lower tail of the GPA distribution. There are also large gender differences with females helped most by diversity. Although the results represent outcomes at only one university, they nevertheless serve as a starting point for quantitatively assessing the impact of a diverse learning environment.     

Social capital determinants and labor market networks

We explore the links between determinants of social capital and labor market networks at the neighborhood level. We harness rich data taken from multiple sources, including matched employer–employee data with which we measure the strength of labor market networks, data on neighborhood homogeneity that has previously been tied to social capital, and new data—not previously used in the study of social capital—on the number and location of nonprofit sector establishments at the neighborhood level. We use a machine learning algorithm to identify the potential determinants of social capital that best predict neighborhood‐level variation in labor market networks. We find evidence suggesting that smaller and less centralized schools, and schools with fewer poor students, foster social capital that builds local labor market networks, as does a larger Republican vote share. The presence of establishments in a number of nonprofit‐oriented industries are identified as predictive of strong labor market networks, likely because they either provide public goods or facilitate social contacts. These industries include, for example, churches and other religious institutions, fire and rescue services including volunteer fire departments, country clubs and golf courses, labor unions, chamber music groups, hobby clubs, and schools.     

Sozialindex für Grundschulen in Mülheim an der Ruhr

The German school system is socially highly unequal, as educational research criticized for a long time. While in some schools socially privileged pupils are the majority, other schools are composed by mostly poor pupils. The combination of socio-geographic and educational geographic considerations leads to a social school index, which clearly shows how strong schools are socially privileged or disadvantaged. The paper presents a practical example of building a social school index for cities and compares the results. The residence-based density index on grid data from German Social Code (book 2) is preferred because it is unproblematic in terms of data protection law and can be extended at the level of 100 × 100?m grids. Calculating detailed and differentiated social school indices with school enrollment data leads to very good results, but is much more work.     

Head Start's Comparative Advantage: Myth or Reality?

In recent years, Head Start's prominent role in preparing low‐income 4‐year‐olds for school has been affected by rapid growth in state‐funded pre‐K programs, some of which are based in public schools. This has led to questions about the comparative advantages of these two approaches to early education. An analysis of data from Tulsa, Oklahoma, indicates that the school‐based pre‐K program is more effective in improving early literacy outcomes, while Head Start is more effective in improving health outcomes. The two programs are comparable with regard to early math learning. Social–emotional effects are more subtle, but the school‐based pre‐K program has demonstrable positive effects, while the Head Start program does not.     

Reflections on the Pedagogy of Archaeological Field Schools within Indigenous Community Archaeology Programmes in Australia

In this paper we investigate the pedagogy of archaeological field schools. Specifically, we explore the combination of tertiary level field schools and Indigenous community (or community-based) archaeology. Using a detailed case study of a rock art field school in Arnhem Land, Australia, we explore the processes and outcomes of combining archaeological field training with the ideas and methods of community archaeology. We discuss the relationship and unique challenges faced by such community archaeology field schools, particularly that of balancing the priorities of competing stakeholders. Our discussion illustrates the complexities of training students to work in an environment where cultural belief systems are still strongly linked to sites and landscapes. While the challenges are numerous, the outcomes, particularly for students, provide an unparalleled educational experience, one that cannot be obtained in any other learning format.     

Aboriginal Performance on Standardized Tests: Evidence and Analysis from Provincial Schools in British Columbia

Many indigenous populations are experiencing rural-to-urban migration. In making this transition, indigenous peoples are entering industrial societies where most income derives from wages or salaries, and formal educational achievement is crucial in determining economic prospects. This research analyzes the gap in test score results between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal students in public schools in the Canadian province of British Columbia. It finds a strong effect of school quality, as measured by non-Aboriginal achievement, on Aboriginal achievement. It also finds a nonlinear negative relationship between Aboriginal achievement and the number of Aboriginal students in a school over the empirically observed range. It thus suggests a possible trade-off and dilemma between, on the one hand, policies that enable Aboriginal students to concentrate in a few schools able to provide a culturally sensitive curriculum and, on the other, policies to maximize Aboriginal academic achievement.     

Exploring The Basis For Parental Choice in Public Education

From the perspective of public choice theory, this article explores the relationship between student performance and certain aspects of school organization and operation. Employing multiple regression and analysis of variance techniques, we found that variation in comprehensive student assessment test scores can be explained best by variables such as income, district size, and the extent of classroom crowding. Student performance was lowest in the largest districts. Student performance tended to be better in those school districts with relatively higher incomes, fewer schools, and a lower proportion of oversized classes. These findings confirm the utility of readily available information about public schools as a basis for parental choice and lend support to public choice criticism of large, centralized, educational organizations.     

学区化外部性对城市空间的影响

本文分析了学区房和学区的不同意义,进而对学区的正负外部性进行了解析,认为学区、学校、个人、政府间复杂的博弈关系最终导致了城市中的社会空间分异和居住空间分异的加强。在梳理发达国家主要城市经验、对比北京市与剑桥市的学区发展基础上,指出当前的划区政策增强了学区的稀缺性,却没有增加公平性,从而助推房价的高涨。为了更好地促进教育均等化实现,政府应努力提高优质教育学校的数量;形成资本性收入在学校和市场间的合理流动与分配;废弃以学区为主实施优质学区管理的办法,实施学校分层化管理,从而促进教育公平性和对人力资源开发这一综合目标的实现。     

TIEBOUT DYNAMICS: NEIGHBORHOOD RESPONSE TO A CENTRAL‐CITY/SUBURBAN HOUSE‐PRICE DIFFERENTIAL*

ABSTRACT We take advantage of an unusual natural experiment—a high‐quality 1920s subdivision split neatly in half by a central‐city/suburban boundary—to study the response over 30 years to the relative decline in the quality of central‐city services since the 1960s. As expected, a large sale price differential opens in the 1960s. Demographic characteristics are nevertheless similar across the boundary. Survey data indicate Tiebout sorting: the central city side attracts households who prefer alternatives to suburban public schools. Children attend parochial and public “magnet” schools. A neighborhood association supplements municipal services. Rigid service district boundaries inhibit closure of the house‐price differential.     

Public School Search Policies and the "Politics of Sin"

In recent years, high school students have been subjected to greater levels of drug searching and surveillance on school grounds. The effect of such searching is potentially wide-ranging, because public schools "play an important role in socializing students according to the norms and mores of society" ( Vergari, 2000 ). Using the "morality politics" framework, this study reports and analyzes the presence of random, suspicionless drug searches in the Nebraska public schools. Whereas most studies of morality policy have focused on the state as the unit of analysis, we consider the perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors of principals in regards to drug policies in schools. Our findings, based on a survey of 181 high school principals, reflect several features of morality policy. There has been a significant rise in the number of random drug searches, despite the principals' observation that these measures neither lessen drug use nor catch perpetrators. The most important predictors of drug policy are pressure from local sources, perception of the problem within the community (but not the schools), and the racial composition of schools. Principals articulate limited concern for student rights, and students largely accept searches without resistance. In the discussion, we consider these findings in light of recent court rulings and introduce the potential ramifications of waging the drug war in our nation's classrooms and hallways.