School Choice and the Creation of Social Capital Reexamined

Scholars have argued that by spurring parental involvement in school activities, school choice creates social capital. While government policies may be able to create social capital, we doubt that school choice is such a policy and argue that participation in school activities is largely determined by individual-level attributes and the school context, rather than choice per se. To assess this claim we use the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study data. Unlike most school choice studies, this data set has a large, representative national sample. More importantly, the panel structure of the data allows us to examine the same parents both before and after the school choice decision has been made, permitting a true dynamic analysis. The results demonstrate that actively choosing a child's school does not make parents more likely to participate in school activities. Some institutional attributes of schools do appear to increase parental involvement in school activities, however.     

Crossing roads,crossing boundaries: empowerment and participation in a child pedestrian safety initiative

Children's journeys between home and school have become increasingly problematic in Western cities as a result of intensifying traffic and safety concerns. Many parents now take their children to school by car and, through driving, exacerbate congestion. In response to this situation, a number of school communities, in partnership with local authorities, have established walking school buses (WSBs). In this paper the WSB phenomenon is critiqued, with particular reference to the initiative adopted by a primary school in Auckland, New Zealand. It is concluded that WSBs offer participants a highly ambivalent form of empowerment and spatial freedom that is contingent upon adult surveillance and disciplinary power.     

Deconstructing School Choice: Problem Schools or Problem Students?

School choice has developed into one of the most contentious policy debates in K–12 education. Proponents argue that choice leads to competition among schools, thereby raising school quality for all students, while opponents claim that school choice often results in racial segregation and worsens inequity. The findings of this study, collected from qualitative interviews with school administrators and quantitative analysis of school performance and enrollment data, suggest that a common form of school choice, intradistrict transfer, may not always have the desired impacts on administrators, particularly with regard to intradistrict transfer programs. In addition, the author finds important differences in criteria that shape transfer decisions at different grade levels, and in the factors that shape the decision to transfer away from a school versus those that influence decisions about which school to transfer into.     

From patronage politics to community deliberation: the recent experience of democratic school management in Brazil

The article discusses the limits and possibilities of school empowerment within education systems plagued by pervasive patronage politics. The analysis focuses on reform initiatives implemented by Brazilian sub‐national governments throughout the 1980s and 1990s to allow for the election of school principals by parents, teachers and students. Until the implementation of this reform, state and local authorities had relied on the school system as a source of patronage resources, and principals were nominated according to political criteria. The new system of democratic school management was expected to undermine this patronage‐based system and foster community participation in school decisions. The article relies on secondary evidence to assess the impact of school elections in what concerns the participation of parents, students and teachers in school affairs and the relationship between schools, party politicians and education administrators. It concludes that high levels of social inequality and the lack of a universalistic and effective system of welfare provision constitute serious obstacles to the empowerment of disadvantaged groups in developing societies such as Brazil. On the other hand, the article argues that school empowerment has the potential to undermine resilient patronage structures, by introducing universalistic mechanisms of decision‐making and making school administrators more accountable to their constituencies. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

What Is a Summer Job Worth? The Impact of Summer Youth Employment on Academic Outcomes

This paper estimates the impact of New York City's Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP) on school attendance and other educational outcomes in the following school year for a large sample of low‐income high school students. The program provides summer jobs and training to youth aged 14 to 21, and due to high demand allocates slots through a lottery. Analyses focusing on 36,550 students who applied in 2007 indicate that SYEP produces small increases in attendance in the following school year, with larger increases for students who may be at greater educational risk: those aged 16 and older with low baseline school attendance. For this group, SYEP also increases the likelihood of attempting and passing statewide high school math and English examinations. Findings suggest that although SYEP's explicit goals focus on workforce readiness rather than academics, the program fosters engagement and success in school.     

Junk Food in Schools and Childhood Obesity

Despite limited empirical evidence, there is growing concern that junk food availability in schools has contributed to the childhood obesity epidemic. In this paper, we estimate the effects of junk food availability on body mass index (BMI), obesity, and related outcomes among a national sample of fifth graders. Unlike previous studies, we address the endogeneity of the school food environment by controlling for children's BMI at school entry and estimating instrumental variables regressions that leverage variation in the school's grade span. Our main finding is that junk food availability does not significantly increase BMI or obesity among this fifth‐grade cohort despite the increased likelihood of in‐school junk food purchases. The results are robust to alternate measures of junk food availability including school administrator reports of sales during school hours, school administrator reports of competitive food outlets, and children's reports of junk food availability. Moreover, the absence of any effects on overall food consumption and physical activity further support the null findings for BMI and obesity.     

Brown Fades: The End of Court‐Ordered School Desegregation and the Resegregation of American Public Schools

In this paper, we investigate whether the school desegregation produced by court‐ordered desegregation plans persists when school districts are released from court oversight. Over 200 medium‐sized and large districts were released from desegregation court orders from 1991 to 2009. We find that racial school segregation in these districts increased gradually following release from court order, relative to the trends in segregation in districts remaining under court order. These increases are more pronounced in the South, in elementary grades, and in districts where prerelease school segregation levels were low. These results suggest that court‐ordered desegregation plans are effective in reducing racial school segregation, but that their effects fade over time in the absence of continued court oversight.     

Attitudes toward integration among black and white school board members: Public comparisons and etiological factors

Comparisons of school board members' attitudes toward integration (derived from nationwide surveys of black and white school board members) with public attitudes toward integration indicate that (1) elites (school board members) appeared more liberal than the public for both races; (2) this gap between elites and the public was less distinct for blacks than whites; and (3) black school board members evidenced more liberal attitudes toward integration than white school board members.Multiple regression analyses for school board members indicated that (1) race and education were the main factors determining board members' attitudes toward racial integration; (2) political participation showed a positive association with liberal attitudes toward integration; and (3) initial method of selection (elected or appointed) apparently bears no relationship to attitudes toward integration.     

State supported segregation? Examining migrant clustering in schools in Ireland

Recent education policy debates in Ireland have focused on whether the dominance of the Catholic Church in primary school provision is an appropriate model for an increasingly diverse population, rather than concern with migrant clustering and/or segregation per se. Efforts to ensure that students from a range of religious or non-religious backgrounds are catered for in education contexts are to be lauded. However, this research provides clear evidence of migrant segregation as a result of how school choice impacts attendance patterns on the ground. This is not surprising, given the evidence from research on school choice which highlights the fact that it can exacerbate socio-economic and demographic segregation. As such, enshrining parental choice as the corner-stone of school provision in Ireland is flawed since it, intentionally or otherwise, builds an educational infrastructure that encourages school segregation.     

Policy innovation in local jurisdictions: Testing for neighborhood influence in school choice policies

Before making difficult decisions, individuals tend to collect information on decision makers in reference groups. With respect to policy innovations in a decentralized public sector, this may give rise to positive neighborhood influence on adoption decisions. In this paper, U.S. school district data are used to show that decision makers indeed are heavily affected by decision makers in reference groups. The policy innovation under consideration is inter-district public school choice. The results suggest that if a given district's neighbors' expected benefits from adopting school choice policies increase, this substantially increases the original district's probability of adoption. The paper thus supports the view that the diffusion of policy innovations is stimulated by horizontal interaction among local governments.     

Does Stimulating Physical Activity Affect School Performance?

This paper investigates whether encouraging children to become more physically active in their everyday life affects their primary school performance. We use data from a field quasi-experiment called the Active Living Program, which aimed to increase active modes of transportation to school and active play among 8- to 12-year-olds living in low socioeconomic status (SES) areas in the Netherlands. Difference-in-differences estimations reveal that while the interventions increase time spent on physical activity during school hours, they negatively affect school performance, especially among the worst-performing students. Further analyses reveal that increased restlessness during instruction time is a potential mechanism for this negative effect. Our results suggest that the commonly found positive effects of exercising or participating in sports on educational outcomes may not be generalizable to physical activity in everyday life. Policymakers and educators who seek to increase physical activity in everyday life need to weigh the health and well-being benefits against the probability of increasing inequality in school performance.     

Dark side of social media and academic performance of public sector schools students: Role of parental school support

Students are regularly engaged in several things at the same time during class and school time. They are using smartphones, tablets, laptops, and using social media on these devices while learning and attending class. However, there are some situations likely influenced by this, current study tests the influence of technostress, cyberbullying, and media multitasking in the context of students in technology‐saturated classrooms and how this is affecting their academic performance. This study further explored the buffering effects of parental school support on the relationship between technostress, cyberbullying, and student's performance. By using the person‐environment fit model, this study surveyed 248 public sector school students in two waves and examined the impact of these variables on student's academic performance. Results show that technostress, cyberbullying, and media multitasking have a negative impact on student performance, and school parental support moderates the negative relationship between technostress and student performance. Implications and contributions have also been discussed.     

Who Benefits from Accountability-Driven School Closure? Evidence from New York City

We estimate the effects of accountability-driven school closure in New York City on students who attended middle schools that were closed at the time of closure and students who would have likely attended a closed middle school had it remained open. We find that students who would have entered the closed school had it not closed attended schools that perform better on standardized exams and have higher value-added measures than did the closed schools. While we find that closure did not have any measurable effect on the average student in this group, we do find that high-performing students in this group attended higher-performing schools and experienced economically-meaningful and statistically-significant improvements in their 6th-, 7th-, and 8th-grade math test scores. We find that these benefits persisted for several cohorts after closure. We also find that closure adversely affected students, low-performing students in particular, who were attending schools that closed. For policymakers, our results highlight a key trade-off of closing a low-performing school: future cohorts of relatively high-performing students may benefit from closure while low-performing students in schools designated for closure are adversely affected.     

Performance Measures,Ranking and Parental Choice: An Analysis of the English School League Tables

ABSTRACT

Parental choice among schools in England is informed by annually published school performance (league) tables. The 2006 league tables included a measure of contextual value added (CVA) for the first time. By explicitly accounting for the characteristics of a school's intake, the aim is that CVA should isolate the impact a school has on its pupils' progress and so provide a measure of school effectiveness. In this paper we use UK government administrative data to replicate CVA and other key performance measures in order to investigate the extent to which the current league tables provide the information necessary to support parental choice on the basis of school effectiveness. We find that school rankings based on CVA are largely uninformative for parents: almost half of English secondary schools are indistinguishable from the national average level of CVA.     

Parent Involvement and Educational Outcomes for Latino Students

This study focuses on the determinants and effects of parent involvement in schools, in the context of urban school districts, and particularly with regard to the schools that serve Latino students. Three research questions are investigated in this article: (1) What are schools doing to support parents, foster involvement and engagement in their children's schools, and generally create strong parent‐school relations? (2) How effective are schools at fostering parent involvement? (3) Do schools with more effective parent involvement practices and greater parent participation perform at higher levels than those with less effective practices and lower levels of parent involvement? Data on Latino representation on Local School Councils (LSCs), school‐level demographic and performance indicators, and information on effective school organization, parent involvement, and school practices regarding outreach and engagement with parents and communities are used to investigate these questions. The empirical analysis demonstrates that in addition to previously established aspects of effective school organization, governing arrangements and Latino political incorporation play a critical role in building stronger, more supportive school–parent relations and in encouraging higher levels of parent involvement in formal school activities. Moreover, these practices and relations were found to have important implications for Latino student performance.     

Lessons from New York City's Small Schools of Choice about High School Features that Promote Graduation for Disadvantaged Students

The present paper uses a rich dataset based on naturally-occurring lotteries for 68 new small non-selective high schools in New York City, which we refer to as small schools of choice (SSCs), to address two related questions: (1) What high school features are promising levers for increasing graduation rates for disadvantaged students? and (2) What high school features helped to produce SSCs’ positive impacts on graduation rates? Our findings provide suggestive evidence that school leadership quality, teacher empowerment, teacher mutual support, teacher evaluation and feedback, teacher professional development, data-driven instruction, teacher/parent communication, academic rigor, personalized learning, and teacher/student respect are promising levers for increasing graduation rates for disadvantaged students. Our findings also provide suggestive evidence that many of these school features explain part of the total average SSC effect on graduation rates, although most of this average effect remains unexplained. Lastly, our findings indicate that SSCs are clearly distinguishable from their counterfactual counterparts in terms of school features that were emphasized by SSC funders.     

创新高校教职工思想政治教育工作的思考

随着高等教育改革的不断深入,高校教职工的思想状况发生了较大变化,本文探讨了面对高校教职工思想反映出的问题,创新教职工思想政治工作的新方法。     

中日韩高中生的身心健康:指标、现状及影响因素

本研究从高中生身心良好状态的前提条件入手,构建出高中生的身心健康指标体系,并运用2010年中日韩三国高中生调查数据,分析三国高中生身心健康的现状和影响因素。结果表明:三国高中生的总体状况处于中等水平,运动和睡眠难以保障;国别、学校类型、年级和学业成绩都会显著影响高中生的身心健康状况。     

Does the Cost‐Cutting Strategy of Closing Public Schools Provide Financial Benefits? Evidence From Ohio

From 1995 through 2014, 15 percent of school districts nationwide closed at least one school without opening any new school. Although budgetary constraints have been claimed as a major reason to close a public school, no empirical study has examined the financial benefits of school closures. This study finds that Ohio school closures reduce an average district's total operating expenditures by $278–$285 per pupil, and that savings come primarily from cuts in classroom instructional services, including teachers. This study provides empirical evidence on the financial implications of school closings needed for stakeholders involved in a school closing process.     

《校车安全条例(草案)》的政策议程分析——基于多源流模型的视角

校车安全问题何以进入决策者的视野是理解《校车安全条例(草案征求意见稿)》得以快速发布的关键。采用案例分析法,从多源流理论视角对校车安全的源流发展、焦点事件和政策行动者等方面进行整体分析,研究表明:校车安全政策议程是政策企业家在政策窗口开启之时推动问题、政策和政治三大源流汇合的结果。相比垃圾桶模型、触发机制模型和议程设置理论,多源流模型在本案例中更具解释力。同时,多源流模型面临中国情境,源流之间存在相关性,而非完全独立。拥有双重身份的政策企业家具有从政府机构中打开"政治窗口"的可能性,这为多源流模型的本土化应用与后续研究提供了一个可供考察的角度。最后,指出阻碍校车安全政策议程设置的主要因素包括,制度性利益表达通道不通畅、政府部门对焦点事件处理能力和水平不高、管理权限划分模糊。为此,应创建有效的制度性利益表达通道、积极关注媒体舆情,扩大问题来源、科学合理划分管理权限。这些问题及对策对于其他政策领域也具备一定的借鉴意义,这也是本研究对政策制定者的启迪所在。